On Thursday, December 12, 2019 at 1:32:49 PM UTC-8, Chalo wrote:
Sir Ridesalot wrote:

And they sometimes do it on a main street in heavy traffic - bicycle
as well as vehicle heavy traffic where the wrong direction riding
bicyclist is a hazard to others not just themselves.

The hazard is from motorists. Whether the thing that put you in front of a motor vehicle was another bicyclist, an animal, a child, a stray shopping cart, clogged storm drain, gust of wind, or whatever-- the hazard and fault always lies with the motorist. They brought it with them.

I did a 37 mile ride yesterday. It was coldish and I wore some "water resistant" RockBros pants for the first time. Let me tell you to NEVER make the mistake of buying those. They had so much resistance to pedaling that I must have been burning twice as much energy to go half the normal speed.

Of course, I was 12 miles from home and it began raining. Thinking it a passing shower I stopped under an overpass and waited. As soon as it appeared to lighten I hightailed it for home. Well, it was just a momentary lull. By the time I got home I must have weighed 10% than my normal weight. I wrung perhaps a pint of water out of my gloves. Went through the house to retrieve my bike on the side and then stripped in the garage and threw everything into the washing machine. A hot shower with a lot of soap and fresh clothing and I felt a newer but very tired person.

With the rain hiding the bicycle lane lines passing cars seemed to take great joy in hitting any and every puddle as they passed you. Rather than drive one lane over to give a cyclist as much room as possible there would be an entire string of cars, all in the right lane and no cars at all in the middle lane. I have never figured out why people do this. They will speed up to turn right directly in front of you. No wonder when Californians move to other states people always hate them.

The point of this is that I rode 10 miles with carbon wheels and rim brakes.. Coming to a stop I had be aware of the amount of water on the rims. It would take one turn of the wheels to free the braking track of water and get effective braking. Disk brakes are the same way. The only advantage I can see with disk brakes is that you can get a very nice set of wheels and keep then for a very long time since you can replace the braking surface. But at the cost of Chinese wheels does it really matter all that much?