Bicycle repairs

Heading home from work last Wednesday, a woman stepped out of the bicycle path as I was turning a corner. 10 seconds before I had had full visibility of the next 200 yards of the bike path, which was deserted, so I had slightly more speed than would be recommended. As I see the woman I slam my brakes, causing my tires to skid and me to body check the metal fence just of the bike path. My bicycle fork took a beating as well, so my bike was set for some time in the shop.

With Copenhagen's bicycle-craze, repairs shops and bicycle stores are available, literally, on every street corner. But where demand is high, parts are priced accordingly. Rent and labour are not cheap either in central Copenhagen, so the best thing is often to do it yourself. Bicycle forks, however, are devious contraptions. They come in a variety of sizes, both regarding wheel length and frame size. The variation between sizes is 1/8 of an inch for the steerer and it must match the frame perfectly. Since they start at around 300 DKR when ordered online, I decided to drag it down to my local "pedal-pusher".

With the high prices for new bikes in Copenhagen, a large number of entrepreneurs have set up used bicycle shops and cheap repairs in small hole-in-the-wall joints. A majority of these seem to be people of other ethnic origin than Danish, perhaps due to the relatively low start-up costs and their greater work ethic. They have lower margins, but work longer hours and compete with higher volume. My guy is Sami, a 50-something year old guy from the Middle East with rusty, but understandable, Danish. He gave me a new fork (aluminium forks risk snapping if they have been bent and subsequently straightened), repaired the front brake, oiled it, as well as the whole bike, made sure the gears were working, and he did it all in a day. Price = 500 DKR.

I also bought a helmet. Having previously cycled as a sport, I am well aware of the need for head protection when blasting down a main road with 40 KPH. Copenhagen, however, has a vast network of bicycle paths and bicycle traffic lighting, as well as much more relaxed speeds. Not even 10% of the cyclists here wear helmets (not that that makes it ok), so I never valued it important. The bruises and cuts from this episode are enough to convince me otherwise, even though it (luckily) only affected my thigh, ribs, shoulder and collarbone.

Finally, a remark on not using a helmet. When asking why I am limping, and I respond that I hit a fence, most people ask: "Did you wear a helmet?". When I say no, they have a superior look on their face and say "ahhh", inferring that my lack of helmet was the cause of my injuries. This is retarded. Yes, wearing a helmet is a good idea, but the idea that a helmet is equivalent to not getting injured on a bike is excruciatingly poor logic. It also removes the uncomfortable notion that there is a degree of uncertainty in our lives by creating a causal story - you didn't wear a helmet, you deserved your accident - as well as implying the opposite: I wear a helmet, I'll never have an accident. Humans are programmed to construct causal stories, part of the reason why we are so bad at learning from statistics. We all know that cycling is dangerous, but to quote the social psychologist Richard Nisbett: "[Our] unwillingness to deduce the particular from the general is matched only by our willingness to infer the general from the particular". A moronic logical fallacy, but still the reason why I keep my skull safe for the next 3 weeks of cycling.