Originally Posted by
cudak888
It's something fairly unique to countries like the Netherlands, as @
JaccoW pointed out. The no-parking/leaning signs may exist in some Danish cities as well; not 100% sure.
At any rate, it's no reason for anyone here to give the middle finger salute to the cultural norms in those countries. Just because we don't have the same number of utility riders in the US doesn't mean we should belittle what the NL does; if anything, the NL should be laughing at our lack of bicycle infra.
Jacco qualified his earlier post enough for the difference in location to be clear - @
cyccommute skipped that clarification by to criticize it from the perspective of a US rider only.
-Kurt
I did not skip that “clarification” because it wasn’t in the post I responded to. JaccoW said that leaning a bike against a wall is unstable. It isn’t...at least it is no more unstable than using a kickstand. If a bike leaning against a wall, fence, tree or any other object is “
one flip of the handlebars away from falling over”, so is a bike on a kickstand. The one on the kickstand is even more likely to fall over because the handlebars can be flipped in two directions. Granted, one direction is slightly more stable than the other but it can still fall and it can fall in two directions.
Additionally, as I pointed out, leaning a bike against a wall or something else is away from where people walk. To “flip the handlebars” someone would have to go out of their way to do so. They aren’t likely to just stumble into my bike leaned against something. The same can’t be said for kickstanded bikes. Those are usually parked close to the foot traffic way...often in a manner that blocks the sidewalk.
Originally Posted by
cudak888
My theory is that the POS stamped-steel kickstands that littered bicycle shaped objects from the 1970's through the 1990's - you know, the ones that don't work - helped to give kickstands a bad name to the casual rider, while the elitism of road cycling has kept the undeserved negativity going to this day.
-Kurt
And you don’t think this might have something to do with people not using kickstands?
I've also seen a bunch of mid-2000's Specialized Hard Rocks with Greenfield stands shoved in them - even when it was impossible to fit a stand without causing the FD cable to rub. But I've seen this enough times to realize that a lot of people - or shops - didn't care about compromising their FD just for the benefit of a stand.
I’d say that most every mountain bike made since around 1995 can’t be fitted for a kickstand for similar reasons. A dual suspension bike may not even have a place to clamp one that doesn’t cause other problems. Further, kickstands aren’t something you want on a bike that is being ridden over rocks or being jumped into the air or even being crashed with some regularity. Having the equivalent of a bayonet on a bike is probably not a good idea if the bike and rider are going to be mixed around like laundry in a washing machine. Most people who ride mountain bikes off-road realize this pretty early on. And, once you get used to not having a kickstand, it’s easy to see their lack of utility.
My...and many peoples... avoidance of kickstands isn’t because I’m a “Lance wannabe” but because we no longer see them as something of much use. In my early days of loaded touring, I watched my kickstand sink into the sand on the side of the road many times as the bike slowly toppled over. After just a few times of that happening, it’s just easier to lean the bike against something and, once I got used to leaning it, the kickstand just became unnecessary.