What Cyclists Wish Drivers Knew #5: We actually do obey traffic laws.

I haven't always lived in Indy; in fact I've spent less than half my life in Indiana even though I moved away when I was well into my twenties. I recently moved back to town after "serving a seven-year sentence" in Houston, Texas. If there's one urban legend that permeates the driving community in Houston (where, in an average year, a dozen cyclists die on the roads, most in hit-and-runs), it's that "95% of cyclists run every stop sign and red light."

Well, I must be one of the 5%, then: I'm nowhere near stupid enough to run a red light in Indy, much less in Houston! As for stop signs, well, I'll admit to "Idaho stops" when there are no moving vehicles approaching from any direction. Over the past ten or so years (more than 20K miles on the bikes, I have never had a near miss because I ran a stop sign or stop light. I've had a couple of very close calls when drivers ran stop signs, though.

A Symposium on Shift Cables

A frayed, partially broken shift cable

A while back, I heard a participant in an indoor cycling class talking about shifting problems with her road bike. I could tell she was a distance rider with plenty of endurance rides under her belt, as opposed to someone who rides a few miles on the Monon Trail on holiday weekends. It was also pretty clear, though, that she had limited knowledge of how her machine works. I say that because her problem was a frayed shift cable, but she had no idea why it caused her problem!

My first road bike (a 1964 Garlatti) had shift levers on the down tubes: you could follow the entire length of the cables running from the levers to front and rear derailleur. Not so my current road bikes (a 1994 Trek 1400 and a 2015 Fuji Altamira): they both have Shimano STI® integrated shifters, with the end of the shift cable concealed inside the shifter beneath the rubber “hood.” Cables, in case you didn't know, aren't solid wires: they’re made of multiple strands of stainless steel braided together, which allows them to be flexible while minimizing stretch.