The Bike Electric

I like bicycles, sure, but I’m quite fond of fancy tech bullshit, too. Technology that uses your phone to give everybody in the room a copy of Photoshop, for instance, is cool. Combining technology and bicycles, however, doesn’t seem to agree with me. Maybe I’ve set up too many cycling computers (or, as customers tend to call them, “speedometers”), or maybe I’m just really old now, but I continue to think adding electronics to bicycles is weird.

Obvious exceptions here include bikes with electric motors, lights, and power meters–things that are notoriously challenging to pull off sans electronics, but the most recent push to wire every aspect of our lives–including our bike–strikes me as slightly anti-bike.

Recently looking at the patents Shimano has in the works for taking Di2 and smearing it across every possible function of the bike, including suspension systems, might be what has me going just a little Luddite here, but the recent press about Apple’s “Smart Bike” is what really caught my attention.

In case you haven’t heard, Apple has filed for a patent that essentially wires up your bike, using sensors everywhere and wireless technology to basically record everything, including “speed, distance, time, altitude, elevation, incline, decline, heart rate, power, derailleur setting, cadence, wind speed, path completed, expected future path, heart rate, power, and pace.” Apparently, you could even use voice commands to control the iPhone at the heart of the system. Neato.

Already we’ve seen similar things from Nike, and it’s pretty common to use applications like Strava to track things like training rides and sort through your own data, and I can certainly understand the value of affordable performance tracking equipment for athletes, but beyond that, I’m missing the point. It’s always been the social aspects of these types of systems that puzzle me the most. While I admire anyone’s intense training schedule, I’ll take your word for it, thanks. My desire to know details about other people’s bicycle riding stats falls somewhere below the dietary requirements of zoo-bred lemurs and high fashion. Checking in on someone else’s shared social mileage and elevation gain combines all the joy of seeing photos of what people had for lunch with the pure glee of math. I really like to know people are out riding bikes, but a general sense is all I need to be happy about it. When it comes to detailed stats, my attention wanes. Sorry, but if I wasn’t with you, I just don’t give a shit that you rode your bike. Unless you captured some gnarly video, got hit by an antelope, or both.

My obvious concern, then, is that we let technology do for our bicycles what ubiquitous digital cameras and camcorders have done for our ability to actually see stuff. Once your ride is completely and utterly wired and you’re finally–gloriously–monitoring everything from incline to chamois moisture level to temperature in your Gu packets, will you still remember to enjoy riding your bike? Like taking a picture instead of looking, wiring something that’s inherently fun has the potential to make it a lot less fun.

Maybe once we have the technology to monitor the girl in a t-shirt blowing past your rigged out Starship Enterprise bike on her beat up single-speed and disappearing off into the distance, and convert that event into Siri’s haunting and faltering voice commanding you to “get your fat Fred ass up on the pedals,” I’ll start to understand the appeal.