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Gear Prudence: I would love to bike commute, but, not to sound vain, presentation really matters where I work. There’s a shower at my office, but here’s my problem: hair. At home, I have access to plenty of space, good lighting, a blow dryer, and the assorted products I need to make my hair look good. If I wanted to keep up my current hair routine, I’d have to bring all that stuff in everyday. Wouldn’t that be sort of ridiculous? —Lousy Office Culture Kills Suggestion Of Fashionably Understated Grungy Hair
Dear LOCKSOFUGH: GP supposes you’ve tried doing your hair at home before the ride and have found the results upon your arrival to be unacceptable. GP agrees that it would be annoying—if not downright impossible—to duplicate your home haircare routine in an office bathroom. So don’t try. Certain hair types, cuts, and styles are more conducive to riding to work than others, but you shouldn’t have to dramatically alter your appearance or routine in order to fit biking into your professional life. Unless things change (you get a new job, you’re really close to your office, mandatory helmet laws become mandatory in non-bicycle contexts, etc.) biking to the office might just be off the table. But biking home isn’t, so an afternoon ride home on Bikeshare would be a great solution. If your hair’s a mess when you get home, so what? —GP
Gear Prudence: Why aren’t there more unicycle commuters? There are so many bicycle riders, but almost nobody rides a unicycle. Having only one wheel, unicycles are easier to store, and you almost never hear about a unicycle getting stolen. It has way fewer parts, so maintenance costs must be super low. Seems like a real missed opportunity. —Offering New Evidence, Wryly Hopeful Everyone Embraces Legitimacy
Dear ONEWHEEL: Sure does! At the risk of taking this question too seriously (this is a joke, right?), there’s one major problem with widespread unicycle adoption despite the many benefits you enumerated: Very few people ever learn to ride them. This might have to do with nefarious unicycle education suppression efforts led by the usual cabal from your favorite conspiracy theories, or it might just have to do with the comparative difficulty of balancing and propelling yourself on one wheel. The bicycle’s superfluous (to your mind) second wheel is pretty useful when it comes to getting going and keeping upright, and this seems to compensate for its alleged storage hassles. Could more people start unicycling to work? Sure. The growth of everyday bicycling over the past decade shows that very unpopular things can become marginally less unpopular. Could it eventually get so popular there’s a massive Unicycle to Work Day and a dedicated unicycle advice column in this newspaper? Maybe but probably not. —GP