These kids today. Why aren’t they out there riding their damn’ bikes like we did when we were their age?
Why, when I was a pup. …
Sigh. It’s the same old song; music they’ve never danced to. “I said, ‘Ride, Sally, ride, now. …”
Writing at The Atlantic, freelancer Erin Sagen says today’s kids are very much not riding their bicycles, and for a variety of perfectly defensible reasons, too:
Since the 1990s, speed limits have ticked upward. Each year (minus a few temporary dips), drivers have progressively clocked more collective miles and driven ever larger cars. According to a 2023 report by the nonprofit Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, “Over the past 30 years, the average U.S. passenger vehicle has gotten about 4 inches wider, 10 inches longer, 8 inches taller and 1,000 pounds heavier.” These machines may be protecting drivers and passengers, but they can be much more intimidating to people on bikes. The annual number of children killed on bikes has actually fallen, a 2021 CDC report found, but the report acknowledges that this is likely in part because fewer kids are out riding.
Boy howdy. Citing stats from the National Sporting Goods Association, Sagen writes that during the 1990s, an average of 20.5 million children ages 7 to 17 rode a bike six or more times a year. By 2023, a few decades later, that number dropped to about 10.9 million. And of those kids, less than 5 percent rode their bikes “frequently.”
Six or more times a year? Sheeyit. We hopped on our bikes six or more times a week. Some of us still do. It’s fun, it’s exercise, it’s transportation … it’s liberation. Damn The Man! Let’s get big air at the gravel pit! Using one chain to break another, as it were.
No mas, no mas. !Que triste es la vida velo!
No wonder the Adventure Cycling Association has put its storied headquarters up for sale. Once a must-see for the membership, it’s only visited now by a handful of overripe saddle tramps in saggy wool shorts who just herded a 36-pound steel bike, hung about with tattered ripstop sacks stuffed with camping gear, canned beans, and one change of underwear, from Miami to Missoula without once stopping for a shower.
According to the ACA board of directors, the group’s membership has been dwindling for at least five years as its demographic “ages out” of bike travel. Tours and map sales are likewise struggling, and the association is failing to attract a younger crowd because ACA’s “brand” is seen as a raggedy-assed herd of sunburnt old roadies who just aren’t hep to the latest jive (gravel, bikepacking, insert your thrill of the minute here).
So, bam! The ACA HQ goes on the block, listed for $2.7 million, reports The Missoulian, its hometown newspaper.
I don’t know how this sale might save the ACA, because I haven’t seen any actual rescue proposals put forward. Just some MarketSpeak® in Bicycle Retailer about how ACA is “facing a crossroads,” “grappling with challenges,” and “addressing brutal truths while maintaining faith in the mission,” and how selling the HQ will “help us adapt to our reality, giving us the runway to reshape our programs and resources to continue inspiring transformative bike travel experiences.”
Friend of the Blog Diane “The Outspoken Cyclist” Lees is among those not convinced. She has viewed with alarm at her Substack, and former members of the organization — including its founders — are among the people who put together this petition urging that the sale be stopped.
Now, $2.7 mil’ may sound like a lot of money, especially if you don’t have it. But since Bikecentennial hit the road in 1976 I have, despite an appalling shortage of investment capital and absolutely no plan at all, pissed away at least that much on cigarettes, booze, drugs, guns, comic books, actual literature, albums, CDs, stereo gear, Toyota trucks and Subaru cars, road trips in three countries, moving violations in one of them, cheap motels, pet-friendly rentals, real estate, meals remarkable and questionable, vet bills, drawing paper, pencils, and pens, countless Apple products and peripherals, cable TV, streaming video, Internet hookups (no, not that kind of Internet hookup), blog/podcast hosting, and audio-visual gear.
And the only person who got any bicycling out of it all was me — in 1976, because I had been doing without a driver’s license for a few years thanks to a minor traffic accident (hit by a train), and afterward because I learned to love it (the cycling, not being hit by trains).
By the time Bikecentennial blossomed into the Adventure Cycling Association in 1993 I had settled down a great deal. It helped that after 15 years of newspapering I was officially and permanently unemployed, building a second career of sorts as a freelancer peddling vicious libels, ugly scribbles, and outright lies to niche magazines with the circulation of a week-old murder victim. I had also begun racing bicycles, and acquiring them, the latter a jones which haunts me to this day.
And after a decade and a half of that, thanks to the risk-taking spirit of the late, great Mike Deme, and his successors, Alex Strickland and Dan Meyer, I even sold some word count to Adventure Cyclist, at a time when the decline and fall of the for-profit bicycle magazine had left me short on runway and having trouble adapting to my reality.
Those dudes, and the other great advocates for and facilitators of bicycle travel I met while scribbling bike reviews for Adventure Cyclist, have all left the building that ACA plans to sell for … whatever. I’m sorry that I never visited them there, because now I never will. The building will become a bespoke hotel, law office, or assisted-living residence, whose half-daffy inmates will swear to their keepers that in the wee hours of the darkening night they hear the clicking of wide-range cassettes and catch a whiff of overworked chamois cream.
Sell the real estate? That’s what vulture capitalists do when they add another newspaper to their portfolio. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. A storied newspaper building becomes office space, condos, or a parking lot, the printing gets outsourced, and the few remaining journos who produce the paper are exiled to some soulless strip-mail shithole with all the joie de vivre of a happy-ending massage parlor — chances are the space used to be a happy-ending massage parlor — because the vulture capitalists don’t have any souls of their own and can’t imagine why anyone would want one. Bad for the bottom line.
Sell the real estate? Would the pope sell the Sistine Chapel? Puh-leeze. Dude won’t even Airbnb his summer place at Castel Gandolfo. Even a fucking Realtor will tell you it’s all about location, location, location.
Sell the real estate? It’s like eating your seed corn. Nothing down that long and winding road except for maybe one big dump and then death. Remember the wisdom of another intrepid traveler, Buckaroo Banzai, who has taught us: “No matter where you go, there you are.”
Is it too late for all these weak-in-the-knees whippersnappers askeered of the big, bad cars to revisit their cushy lifestyles, take a big ol’ bite out of life, savor the flavor of adventure cycling? And save the Adventure Cycling Association’s venerable headquarters, the hub around which America’s bicycle-travel universe revolves?
For the love of Deme, put that smartphone down, Rain, Drain or Spokane, whatever the hell your helicopter parents named your sorry ass, unless you’re calling Soma Fabrications to order up a damn’ Pescadero. Listen to the Voices. Here’s your panniers, there’s the door, what’s your hurry?
Don’t make me stop this blog and come back there.
Mad Blog Media 
