Bicycle Gears for Dummies

Cargo bike

Our research team members go about their business in different ways: some stick to a group of topics, some stick to a group of sites, and a few follow serial dumbass freelancers from site to site. Today's DotD nominee was turned up by a staffer who's a cyclist; a cyclist who was flabbergasted by the strange "information" published in the EzineArticles.com post "How to Use Bicycle Gears Properly." The flabbergasted part is because author Joan Bishop Denizot says she started her own bicycle company.

If that's true, you'd think she had a better handle on bicycle gears than she shows in her post.  Perhaps it's because she didn't have an editor, perhaps it's because she didn't know what she was talking about. Either way, a knowledgeable cyclist would not say things like,

• "Both the front and the rear wheels have gears that work together."
• "...remember that the lower numbers on the shifters are the low gears and the higher numbers are the high gears."

Our chief cyclist pointed out that there are no gears on the front wheel of a bicycle. She also informs us that not all shifters are numbered. Both of those are points that Denizot failed to make.
We'll give her (some) credit for pointing out that,

"...low gear... means... [a] combination[of] the small or middle front chain ring and the bigger cogs... in the rear gears... high gear... is a combination of the big chain ring of the front gear and the small sprockets at the rear..."

...although her prose is pretty awful. We do think that her claim, "[H]igh gear is also good to use for accelerating" is misleading if not totally wrong. It might also have helped if Joan had pointed out that there are more than two gears: the total number of gears possible is the product of the number of chain rings (front) multiplied by the number of cogs (rear). She also failed her readers (whom she obviously hoped would be her customers) by not mentioning working through the gears or up- and down-shifting when conditions change as they ride.

This post and her other thirty-four posts at Ezine are little more than advertisements for her line of heavy-duty bikes. More power to her for the idea... but our Dumbass of the Day probably should have found someone to proofread her text before publishing it.

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