These pictures are of my recently rebuilt 1980′s Holdsworth Avanti. It was more of a racing bike when I used it to commute in Chicago. I really love this bike, so I decided to have it built up rather than buy a new bike. It’s been changed to a slower and more upright kind of ride. The frame has been powder coated.

I replaced the drop bars with VO porteur bars. I had the headset replaced with a nice Grand Cru also from VO. I added a brooks b17 saddle, interrupter brake levers, and a replica of the original head badge decal from H LLoyd in the UK. I went from 10 speeds to 1 downtube shifter over the years, but now it’s a single speed. Next for this bike is a Sturmey Archer internal 2 speed kick shift hub when they come out this summer. Don’t hate on the crankset! I’d like to have it replaced in time as well but for now it works fine. The Holdsworth is currently a short trip summer get-around bike.

—Anthony

From our friends over at Let’s Go Ride a Bike:

Visit Let’s Go Ride a Bike for details →

As much as we like to use public transit in combination with our bicycles for transportation, limited service on the weekend sometimes forces us into the car. We drive a tiny, fuel-efficient vehicle, and we don’t like racks on the outside because they negatively impact fuel economy, so a pair of folding bikes that fit in the back are a perfect way to extend our reach.

This past weekend’s excursion was a great example of how the folders work for us. It was too far to ride from our house to the events downtown. We could have taken the bikes on the train, but because of limited weekend service, it would have been a 13 hour day; not too practical for a 3-hour event. The alternative was to throw a pair of folders in the car, drive to town and park in a central location, then use the bikes to get around. It was a reasonable compromise that met our needs while keeping our fuel consumption to a minimum.

Spectating in person at a professional stage race is not like watching on television. You arrive hours early to stake out a viewing spot (sometimes days ahead in the case of big races like the TDF), hang around and chat about bikes, eat some food, perhaps partake in a little liquid refreshment, and follow the race progress on your iPhone or portable TV. Eventually, word comes that the peloton is approaching, and as everyone presses forward to the curb, the race roars by like a passing train, departing as quickly as it arrived. It ends up being an awful lot of build up for what amounts to about 30 seconds of excitement.

Stage one of the Tour of California was in town yesterday. The race has traditionally been held in February, but because bad weather has hampered attendance in years past, the organizers moved the race forward to May. It was a calculated risk due to the fact that the race now coincides with the Giro d’Italia, but it paid off big time with attendance by some of the top riders in the world and the biggest crowds of any sort I’ve seen in downtown Sacramento.

We spent the afternoon hanging out with friends at the Bikes in the Park race viewing event in Fremont Park where the Bicycle Film Festival was held just the night before. The weather was perfect, and it was a real treat seeing so many people out-and-about on bikes of all sorts, relaxing and having a great time. It appeared that for many people (including us), the event was more about socializing and enjoying the spectacle than it was about the race itself. One block off of the race course a person could have mistaken the scene for a Ciclovía. It got me wondering whether Sacramento is ready for one of these wonderful Columbian street closure events.

The local dignitaries, the mainstream press, and the traveling road show that are part-and-parcel of any large stage race were all concentrated down around the finish line. It was quite a contrast to the scene at Fremont Park where many of the most active bicycle advocates in the area were assembled. The disconnect between these two locations was a perfect metaphor for the disconnect that sometimes exists between the racing community and the advocacy community. It begs the question, do large races like this do anything to increase participation in utility bicycling or improve conditions for everyday transportational bicyclists? Honestly, I don’t know. And while the race is headed off to another city today before the dust has even settled, the dedicated individuals who make up the bike advocacy community are rolling up their sleeves and getting back to work.

Wow, how time flies! Today marks two years to the day that we published our first blog entry. We wanted to take this opportunity to take a look back and reflect upon what has been an eminently enjoyable 24 months of serving up your daily dose of EcoVelo.

Stats
We posted 1,781 articles over the past two years, with 14,412 comments on those posts submitted by our readers — that’s an average of over 8 comments per post. Our post “More Sam H. Pics” from September, 2009 received the most traffic. It still receives quite a few visits every day, with some coming from the Rivendell website, and others from various forums and photo sites from around the globe. Right behind in the number of visits was “Gallery: Alan’s Surly Long Haul Trucker” from June, 2008. Like the Sam H. post, this one also receives a lot of incoming traffic from bike forums and photo sites. Apparently, people like to look at photos of pretty bikes! The top Op-Ed piece was on helmets (an always controversial topic), and the number one off-topic post was about bike cameras; not surprising considering what appears to be our unusually high percentage of readers/riders who are also photographers.

Speaking of photographs, our two photo contests were successful beyond all expectations, with somewhere around 700 photos submitted (my wrist was sore for weeks after processing those photos… LOL). With the help of our generous sponsors, we were able to award nearly 50 prizes to the winners in our “Endless Summer” contest. Look for another photo contest later this year.

Our overall site visits have been on an upward arc from the beginning, growing by 843% in 24 months and 39% in just the past two months. This is the most powerful affirmation possible that we’re headed in the right direction. Thank you!

Challenges
As the site has grown, spammers and trolls have become quite a challenge. The number of what we call “drive-by” trolls has increased exponentially (drive-by trolls are people who visit the site for the first time, leave a snarky comment to pick a fight, then leave as suddenly as they arrived). While we like the concept of open forums, history and experience have shown that it takes fairly aggressive moderation to maintain a safe and friendly discussion environment on the internet. This is a top priority for us, so to get a handle on the situation we implemented full comment moderation earlier this year. Moderation slows down the discussions a bit, and a small number of legitimate comments end up getting filtered, but we think the unusually positive discussion environment we’ve created speaks to the fact that it was a good decision.

We switched webhosts this past year. After traversing a very rocky road with a highly-regarded, boutique web host who grew way too fast and suffered for it, we switched to a smaller, but lean-and-mean web host, and in the process cut our latency and load times by 50% while reducing our monthly expenditures. Moving an active website is never a pleasant process, but it was well worth the effort.

Rewards
We’re still amazed by the number of comments we receive from readers who were inspired to give bike commuting a try after reading our blog. This simple fact is what we’re all about and it explains why we maintain a strict focus on our core mission. Many, many thanks to all of you who have written us personally to share your stories. Keep riding and writing!

Personal Highlights
We feel extremely fortunate that we were given the opportunity to shoot the lifestyle photos for the 2010 Breezer catalog and website. Our trip back to Pennsylvania for the photo shoot was a crazy adventure that will remain in our memories forever. Many thanks to our friends at Breezer!

We also mustered up the courage to enter a few photo contests this past year and were pleasantly surprised (shocked was more like it) when we took first place in both Princeton Tec’s “Got Lights on Bikes” photo contest and Wend Magazine’s “Friday Photo” contest (twice). We are sincerely grateful that we had these opportunities to stretch a little; the positive feedback provided much needed encouragement to keep moving in this direction and step through those doors when they open up.

Acknowledgements
We’d like to extend a heartfelt thank you to all of our faithful readers. Without you the site would have no reason for being. Your participation in our community is a major reason why we keep plugging away at the rate of 3-4 posts per day despite busy careers and family obligations.

We’d also like to extend a sincere thank you to all of our sponsors, without whom it would be very difficult to justify the amount of time and effort we put into the site. Our sponsors provide many of the bikes and accessories featured in our product reviews, so please support us by supporting them!

And, of course, we’d like to thank our family and friends for their unending support and encouragement, both of which are vital in making it possible to do what we do.

Looking Ahead
Even though we’ve made good progress, we feel as if we’re just now getting our feet under us. We have a seemingly endless list of ideas and new features we plan to implement in the coming years; we hope you stick around to see what we have in store for you!

All the best,
Alan & Michael

From cyclenine on YouTube.

From markenlei on YouTube.