I'm a Car Guy...

always have been always will be. I grew up loving cars. My father was in the auto industry & raced cars. I own a cool vintage car, love road trips & the interstate highway system. I actually like driving though not so much in the city. Who really does anyway?

   I'm also a cyclist and have been since my youth in the 1970's. I worked in bike shops & as a bike mechanic. This year I'll end up riding over 8000 miles. Again. I raised my sons to be avid cyclists. One works in a bike shop & is an intern at Chainlink. The other refuses to get a drivers license. 

   So am I Schizophrenic? Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde? Am I sleeping with the enemy? Can you support Palestinian statehood & Israel?

   I've been a member of CL since we numbered in the hundreds & I've seen it all on this forum so if you must flame me try & be creative.

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Permalink Reply by Gort 12-mile Pinklegneep on November 30, 2012 at 4:51am

I'm not necessarily gonna jump on someone just for having a car, but the suggestion that you need a car if you have kids is gonna be a problem. 

AM said:

Besides, some of us have kids and other members of the family that aren't able to hop on a bike and ride 10 miles for transportation purposes.

Permalink Reply by GabeW (not the other Gabe) on November 30, 2012 at 5:40am

Cars are expensive, but not necessarily any more expensive than any other hobby that one might be passionate about.  There are plenty of cycling enthusiasts with more invested in their bike stable than I have in my garage.  Of course I'm not talking about someone who thinks they need a SUV to commute on the highway everyday to get to work and walmart and then pay a mechanic for everything that breaks.  And I'm not talking about someone investing in an antique with pedigree or history, although that can be done cheaply too.  My friend has a ferrari for less than it costs to own a new hyundai.  I'm no common example and neither is he, but it was the same price for me to drive to work (gas and insurance included) as a CTA monthly pass.  Now that it's going up, driving is cheaper for me from Evanston to the loop.  And if I'm smart about when I go I have a very pleasant cruise up lakeshore without traffic.  I get as much joy out of the activity of driving that route as I do riding the path in to work. My maintenance costs are the same whether I bike or take transit since I'm pushing the car hard other times on a track.

For me there is a huge community aspect to it.  I have two kinds of friends now - lifelong/old friends, and subaru owners.  Rick called it a scooby (common in UK, subie is more often used here but if you like F1 then you're obviously more worldly, haha), not many cars have established nick-names.  It's men and women of all ages and our kids and parents too.  Plenty of female teams in the Rally America series, and often times husband/wife drivers/navigators or navigators/drivers.  And no offense, but the atmosphere at car events (the ones I go to - club meets, stage rallyes, TSD rallyes, scca rallyx and autox,) have been more welcoming than cycling group rides, swap meets, and crits that I've gone to, or at best equal.


As for safety, if I can thread a car between two orange cones while at the limit of grip and often times just a little past that, pushing the car on a moist, recently disqed, soy bean field right after harvest then there's absolutely NO reason why anyone would run into any kind of incident on the road.  Cars are quite capable of being kept in control at high speed, so low speed traffic situations should never get ugly.  Drivers ruin it.  The last time I did bike the drive I saw more ambulances and vehicle to vehicle collisions in those few hours than my entire career of commuting to and from work in my car on that same bit of road.  Congestion, excitement, and distraction cause accidents.  I actually think that if there was more of a car racing culture here that the roads would be safer.  When you know what you're doing, where to do it, and get to do it, then the desire to do it in the street goes away as your awareness of how a car at speed behaves goes up.  Our culture is that of status, not performance.  Which is evident when you go to a scca event and the loud built up "tuner" cars finish behind the guy with a fairly stock looking POS he picked up at the junk yard and just tightened up a bit, then drove the wheels off of.

Permalink Reply by Far'arned Retrogrumpalunkus #63 on November 30, 2012 at 5:56am

^^^^What Gabe said^^^^

The same goes for motorcycles.  Racing a motorcycle on the track or off-road dirt bikes is a great hobby and doesn't have to be any more expensive than many other hobbies. 

Permalink Reply by Kevin Wright on November 30, 2012 at 7:01am

Michael, I suggest you think more about motorcycles.  I grew up a car guy and still am, but I learned to love motorcycles in my late teens and am now a certified instructor for the MSF.  I also love bikes.  There is an uneasy relationship between bicyclists and car drivers.  Most people absolutely despise bicyclists.  It's a fevered and pure hatred and I'm sometimes afraid to tell people I bike.  But then on the other end you have the people like the commenters on this thread who think cars are the devil and want everyone who owns a car to perish in a fire.  What I like about motorcycles is that instead of being disliked by one group or the other you can simply be hated by BOTH groups.  It has some of the best aspects of bicycling (being outside, maneuverability, lower eco impact) and the best of cars (fast, not as much work as cycling, can make it home after a 14 hour day when your legs and feet are dead to the world).  It's also really cheap.  A good used bike will cost you $2000, insurance is about $180 per year, and you get amazing MPG. 

Permalink Reply by Barry T on November 30, 2012 at 7:01am

I love bikes and am an avid cyclist (over 8300 miles this year so far) and also a car guy with a 1966 GTO convertible 389 ci tri power with 4 speed

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Permalink Reply by El Dorado on November 30, 2012 at 7:10am

I have learned to appreciate the gift of driving & automobiles. Having my drivers license suspended/revoked for nearly a decade due to a "a few' DUI's, I was forced into the world of biking. Surprising, I continue to enjoy commuting at times by bike. Oh, and I stay off the booze also.

Permalink Reply by Nicholas Tkaczuk on November 30, 2012 at 7:11am

Eight-thousand miles a year on a Bike? You're definately not schizophrenic. You can be many other things; car guy, motorcycle across south america guy, even stamp collector guy. But anyone who travels 8000 mile on a bike is most certainly a bike guy.

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Permalink Reply by Noah Shlaes on November 30, 2012 at 7:16am

The Car / Bike guy seems a natural.  Heavy duty biking seems to require mechanical aptitude - there are always adjustments / repairs to be made, and sooner or later you get sick of waiting / paying for someone else to do it.  People who take care of their own machines tend to be people who love machines - all machines.

I've got a tiny antique car, and it got hit last year.  I had to drive about 30 miles to a specialist for the bodywork.  The look on the guy's face when he saw a disassembled road bike in the passenger seat was worth the price of admission!  (Hey, I had to get home, and it was summer!)

If you look in my garage, you'll see lots of things with a common thread - red things with engines.  Car, scooter, etc - and if you count me as the engine, then you can count the bikes too.  

Permalink Reply by Far'arned Retrogrumpalunkus #63 on November 30, 2012 at 7:35am

I agree to a point.  A motorcycle is almost worthless in this city.  Parking is no easier/cheaper on a motorcycle than in a car, and legally a motorcyclist must operate his vehicle just like it were a car.  Lane-splitting/filtering is seriously frowned-up here.   I am a life-long motorcyclist who has been riding for over 40 years but I gave up trying to use a motorcycle within the city.  In the burbs is a different story but living in Logan Square I find a motorcycle pretty much useless for any trips within the city compared to a bicycle. 

Every once in a while I'll go on a nice long ride and get out of the city.  I love to shoot over to the Mississippi on my VFR and follow the river North to around Lacrosse or the Twin Cities and then meander my way back towards Madison randomly hitting much of the back roads of the driftless area.  Then I'll visit my parents there before making the boring drone back home on the super-slide through flatland.   It's a fun way to spend a day but 3-4 fill-ups at $20-25 tank don't make for a cheap day trip any more.   I do it less and less. and the poor VFR sits in my garage unloved while my bikes get ridden almost every day.   I have just as much fun making a run up to Highland Park and back on my Raleigh as I would go for a long trip on my VFR. 

Kevin Wright said:

Michael, I suggest you think more about motorcycles.  I grew up a car guy and still am, but I learned to love motorcycles in my late teens and am now a certified instructor for the MSF.  I also love bikes.  There is an uneasy relationship between bicyclists and car drivers.  Most people absolutely despise bicyclists.  It's a fevered and pure hatred and I'm sometimes afraid to tell people I bike.  But then on the other end you have the people like the commenters on this thread who think cars are the devil and want everyone who owns a car to perish in a fire.  What I like about motorcycles is that instead of being disliked by one group or the other you can simply be hated by BOTH groups.  It has some of the best aspects of bicycling (being outside, maneuverability, lower eco impact) and the best of cars (fast, not as much work as cycling, can make it home after a 14 hour day when your legs and feet are dead to the world).  It's also really cheap.  A good used bike will cost you $2000, insurance is about $180 per year, and you get amazing MPG. 

Permalink Reply by mark stetson on December 6, 2012 at 5:35pm

I grew up a gear head, had a Corvette with a 454 as a senior in high school.  It was my 3rd car (with countless more to come in the next 10 years) which should give you an idea how important cars were to me.  I bought them all with money I made pitching manure.  After I got my degree I spent 6 years working in SCCA, IMSA, and CART as a mechanic.  I never had a decent bike until I quit my last mechanic job and wanted something to commute between farms.  Today, I still have vehicles, but they mostly sit around for weeks, sometimes months,  at a time.  I haven't driven in the past week, but I rode a bike every day.  I wish gasoline was $30/gallon.  It's going to take some number like that before the average US citizen will change.

Permalink Reply by GabeW (not the other Gabe) on February 25, 2013 at 8:20am

Just got back from a race weekend.  The legs on the right are mine, the legs in the middle stopped to pick up a bicycle on the way home from this event :)  The "whamberlamps" is our service truck, complete with couch, fridge, and all the comforts of home.

Ready to hit the night stages

And the drive down there was a perfect example of why I endorse rallyx and driver education.  We drove straight into the blizzard that hit last Thursday.  Cars were stuck in the ditch left and right.  We took it slow, stayed in line, and didn't do anything crazy, and even still there was very little traction.  But I slide my car around for fun and games all the time in a controlled setting.  When the time came to handle the car in an uncontrolled setting where it was anything but fun and games, the skills I've been practicing on the dirt, ice, snow, and mud for the last few years made it a piece of cake.  We just kept a good distance from everyone else on the road and pressed on.

...of course us subaru guys are a little nuts that way.  Our driver said he preferred the road conditions that weekend to the dry dirt it usually is, and it payed off.  We got 2nd in class and 4th overall out of 32 teams.  Made our job easy - just top up fluids, bleed the brakes, and clean the windows.

Permalink Reply by Julie Aberman (Hochstadter) on February 25, 2013 at 9:25am

that's one colorful car!

GabeW (not the other Gabe) said:

Just got back from a race weekend.  The legs on the right are mine, the legs in the middle stopped to pick up a bicycle on the way home from this event :)  The "whamberlamps" is our service truck, complete with couch, fridge, and all the comforts of home.

Ready to hit the night stages

And the drive down there was a perfect example of why I endorse rallyx and driver education.  We drove straight into the blizzard that hit last Thursday.  Cars were stuck in the ditch left and right.  We took it slow, stayed in line, and didn't do anything crazy, and even still there was very little traction.  But I slide my car around for fun and games all the time in a controlled setting.  When the time came to handle the car in an uncontrolled setting where it was anything but fun and games, the skills I've been practicing on the dirt, ice, snow, and mud for the last few years made it a piece of cake.  We just kept a good distance from everyone else on the road and pressed on.

...of course us subaru guys are a little nuts that way.  Our driver said he preferred the road conditions that weekend to the dry dirt it usually is, and it payed off.  We got 2nd in class and 4th overall out of 32 teams.  Made our job easy - just top up fluids, bleed the brakes, and clean the windows.

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