Fat bikes make for poor engineers

The Netherlands is known for its bike culture. We have far more bicycles than inhabitants. I have four bicycles: one to commute to work every day, a lighter one to take with me on vacation trips, one ‘Tour de France’ racer and one mountain bike, even if we have no mountains. When a foreign PhD student arrives in our group, they’re shocked that I ride my bike to work. “Don’t you have a car?” they ask. Of course, I do, but I prefer to ride my bike. It barely takes more time than going by car and, most importantly, the travel time is predictable, so I need no margins for traffic. “Do you ride an electric bike then?” they ask. I don’t. I’m fit enough, and by biking, I stay fit.

Why am I writing about cycling in Bits&Chips? Well, we have a bike problem that may affect the future influx of students!

My best Dutch students seem to come from the countryside. The more north and east you go in the country, the less dense the population and the worse public transportation is. So, kids have to rely on their bicycles to go to school. Highschools can easily be a 15K ride in rural areas. Kids used to have no problem with that. No e-bikes back then. Windforce 11? Just peddle harder! Snow dunes? Walk a bit until you can ride again. These kids had persistence. They stare at the horizon in the flat landscape, feel the wind on their face and let their legs do the hard work. Don’t moan, just do it!

With this kind of mentality, you can fight through difficult books, puzzle hard on mathematics and try to solve a problem until you wake up at night with the solution. Persistence is an excellent characteristic of an engineer. There’s no easy solution, otherwise someone would have already solved it. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed working with many persistent students.

But society is changing. And, at the risk of sounding like an old man, things were better in the past. E-bikes rapidly replaced regular bikes. I’m almost the only one on a regular bike when I commute. E-bikes make life easier, but they require little effort and persistence.

Things have gotten even worse with the arrival of the fat bikes. Looking a bit like a small motorcycle, they have small wheels but very fat tires and seats for two. Most riders are kids below 12 years old. Fat bikes are easy to tune up in speed. Where a regular e-bike has a hard speed limit of 25 kilometers per hour, fat bikes are designed to be manipulated with a smartphone app and can reach speeds up to 70 kph! And these 12-year-olds have no idea about traffic rules at all. They ride on the wrong side of the road. They hold their smartphones in one hand while slaloming through the traffic with the other. Motorways, bike lanes, pavement, grass and front yards – it’s all good on those fat tires! Many accidents have happened already. I’m still puzzled about what possesses parents to allow their kids to use these machines.

So, the idea of persistence and biking to school in any weather has been turned into a joyride where all rules are ignored. Immediate satisfaction!

What does this mean for my future student population? Will they have enough persistence to do long and challenging tasks? My hopes are set on the shoddy Chinese quality of fat bikes. If you look at the mechanics, you can see they won’t last very long. One day, these bikes will break down. I hope in a snowstorm in the middle of nowhere, out of reach of cellphone towers. Either they’ll have to walk home for hours and get a lesson in persistence or they’ll try to repair their fat bikes themselves. Either way, it’ll help make them better engineers.