Horses for course. In ordinary circumstances, my go-fast bikes only come out for recreational purposes. I carry just enough stuff to deal with diabetic issues (eats, glucose testing equipment, phone, tube+tools). I usually won't even take a lock, which is 6-odd pounds of deadweight in that situation.
I know you walk your bike around in retail establishments, but that's not an option for everybody. I live in a much more compact city that I'm pretty sure has a much higher percentage of people on bikes - possibly even a larger raw number. There are a few non-bike retailers in Berkeley that will let people bring bikes in; the Trader Joe's downtown springs to mind. But most won't. Rent is super-expensive here (and still climbing; being a bedroom community for the tech industry has its drawbacks), and floorspace is limited. If all the people who'd like to walk their bikes indoors actually did so, the fire marshal would come down on the retailers like a ton of bricks. My perspective is different, in large part because 80% of my mileage and 90% of my riding time is spent on my pack mule: An early 70s Raleigh International with F/R Bruce Gordon racks. The front Ortliebs I usually leave off, but the rear Ortliebs are always mounted. My county outlawed plastic shopping bags 2.5 years ago, and retailers charge 10 cents each for paper bags. Parking, locking up, unclipping my Backroller Plus*** and slinging it over my shoulder is as instinctive to me as scratching my nose. I have yet to pay for a shopping bag. To anticipate the question, I've also never lost a bag; mismatched bags on a scabby-looking bike seems to diminish thief interest. * The Backroller Plus goes into the store, because it's much lighter than the three mismatched Backroller Classics Peter Adler who bikes survivalist-style, like he's homeless in Berkeley, CA/USA On Thursday, May 28, 2015 at 3:00:26 PM UTC-7, Patrick Moore wrote: > > Peter, you are looking at it all wrong. It's not how little a musette > carries, it's that, riding the gofast on a pleasure ride, my musette lets > me stop en route, shope, and carry essential dinner ingredients home. > Indeed, i could have stuffed half the load into the new Banzer custom bag, > but I wanted to see what Reg could carry. > > Ordinarily, of course, I have far more capacious options for loads: 2 X > Ortlieb Packers, for example, on the other bikes. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "RBW Owners Bunch" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to rbw-owners-bunch+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to rbw-owners-bunch@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/rbw-owners-bunch. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
