My bahookie is getting bored with sitting on hard wooden chairs in my hotel’s bar/restaurant, despite wearing padded cycling shorts. Yellow bikes don’t help either.

Friday 2019_01_18

Another day of reading, administrivia, emailing and making arrangements. Hugo has arranged a meeting next week with the leader of a civil society organisation. With a bit of luck, that will involve gathering data as well as getting to know more about São Paulo’s civic scene. Apart from that, there’s no work progress that I can report without going into tedious detail.

Around midnight I realised I was hungry, so I decided to hire a bike and head up Avenida Brigadeiro Faria Lima in search of fast food. I wanted to try a Yellow bike to compare it to the Itau bike I’d already tried. Based on this statistically insignificant trial, Itau beats Yellow hands down – but my bike (Lev Davidovitch Bikestein) is far better, of course.

Possibly the worst feature of the Yellow bike I used was the lack of gears. I think this compromised the gear ratio (too high to start off smoothly, but too low to pedal comfortably) and necessitated quite short cranks. Also, the luggage-carrier didn’t pivot with the handlebars, which seemed counterintuitive. (I assume that experienced Yellow riders probably wouldn’t notice this.)

It didn’t help that the rear wheel on my bike was slightly buckled. I think this may be because Yellow bikes work on the hire-anywhere-dump-anywhere model, so aren’t left in places where it is easy to maintain them. I saw a couple of kids dump Yellow bikes right in the middle of the cycle-path. This is the most inconsiderate thing I’ve seen on São Paulo’s vehicle-ways. (Motorcyclists are very cheeky, and take advantage of any gap, so it’s a close call. However, car-drivers are very polite in my limited experience.)