The need for speed

[mindstalk]

A dull post: me measuring walking and biking speeds.  I went up and down Sheridan drive by Bryant Park, the stretch with the wide boulevard and pedestrian/bike lanes and little traffic, on bike and on foot, and later measured my map carefully.  Seems to be 0.23 miles.  Walking is 230 seconds, or 3.6 mph, which is similar to Pasadena speed-of-motion[1] estimates of 3.8 mph; biking with some effort was 70 seconds up the slope, 65 down, or about 12 mph; biking hard in a high gear was 55 seconds each way (with some standing pedaling upslope), for 15 mph.  Real bicyclists tend to go faster, don't they?  Or they can.  Then again, my bike is a $250 mountain bike or hybrid, built for stability and indestructibility, not speed.  I wonder sometimes what a road bike would be like.

[1] How fast my body is actually moving.  As opposed to speed-of-travel over longer distances, which got cut down to 3 mph thanks to stoplights and such.

Comments

[fanw.livejournal.com]

Your local biking geek here: you may not get a whole lot of extra speed from a road bike given your description. Mountain bikes tend to have lower gears than road bikes, and are thus better for climbing hills. However, road bikes will definitely get you more speed on downhills and thus more momentum overall, sometimes helping you get over that uphill without having to pedal too much. In a trafficky environment, I really don't think there's very much difference because I don't find a real increase in acceleration for road bikes, unless of course you have toe-clips or clipped-in-shoes, which you could do for a mountain bike too.

In fact, if you want to get more speed I would
1) just do the hill more often. Your muscles will make up the difference! and
2) Get a plain plastic or cloth strap toe-clip so you can use your upward bound muscles as well as your pushy muscles. (Um, hamstrings vs quads?)

Them's my two cents!

Danke

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

It's surprisingly hard to find a stretch of flat land in Bloomington, actually. Not big hills like SF or Seattle, but lots of ups and downs; Pasadena was comparatively quite flat. Or my SF neighborhood.

Hadn't thought of straps for using muscles on the full pedal cycle. You call it toe-clips; I visualize a strap over the middle of the foot. Same thing?