The thing you value most.
 

So what is the one thing that everyone here values the most for their morning commute. (Please dont post your bike) what is the one piece of equipment that has either saved your neck or that you will never leave home without. If you have a funny or interesting story, feel free to share.

Park Tool MTB-3. On more than one occasion in my short tenure of bike commuting.

http://kc-bike.blogspot.com/2006/12/...escue-and.html

My eyeglass mirror...

to be sung to the tune of "My Favorite Things"

a black balaclava with neoprene booties,

cell phone and helmet and Clif Bars and goodies,

studded snow tires to ride over ice,

these are some things that I find very nice...

when the wind blows, when the snow flies, when it's really rad

I simply remember my favorite things and then I don't feel so bad!

In the dark, my Cygolite Rover.

buzzman, that was excellent.

I LOVE my trunk/pannier combo pack (especially since it allows me to carry all the other gear I love/need/use), but my answer would have to be: my helmet. Or rather, the helmet I used to own and had to replace after it saved part of my head and face last year. :)

edit: anyone else see the irony in the OP's signature considering the thread he's started?

My new JetLite. It lights the sometimes rough streets of Sactown and cannot be ignored by motorists.

http://www.jetlites.com/images/05sfsb_ss_product.jpg

I can't think of one thing - including the particular bike I ride - that I couldn't commute without. Or, to put it another way, there is no thing that I have needed on every ride.

I really like having a rack on the bike, but I have commuted by backpack.
I wouldn't ride at night without a light, but I would commute in the summer without one.
I always wear my helmet, but I never have used it on the commute.
I always carry tools and tire repair equipment, but I almost never use them.
I carry a garage door opener and use it twice a commute. But it's not essential.
I love my cold and wet weather gear, but I don't use them on warm, dry days.
I love my fenders, but... you get the idea.

I think the thing I value *most* is a tire repair kit and pump. If I were just starting to commute and all I had to ride on was the most basic of bicycles, I'd start by getting a pump, tube, patch kit, gloves, a helmet, and a lock - probably in that order.

http://www.sheldonbrown.com/harris/images/BE1500.jpg

Except mine is silver plastic instead of black.

I refuse to ride without my maintenance gear. That's a simple multi tool, tire levers, pump, patch kit, and 2 tubes. I only started the two tubes thing because of what happened to me a month ago. I was riding along, and I saw a fellow commuter on the side of the road with a flat. He didn't have a spare, nor did he have a patch kit, so I gave him my only spare tube and made sure he was good to go before continuing on my ride home. Not 200 yards down the road, I feel the dreaded slosh, slide and thump-thump in my rear wheel. Karma's a load of sh*t in my opinion, hehe. Even so, I still stop to help a fellow biker out every time. It was a pretty nasty pinch flat that I got from a rough part of the road (I should've checked the air pressure before the ride..). I had to call my wife to come and get me after an hour of unsuccessfully trying to patch it. So I vowed to never again be stuck without a tube, so I carry TWO of them. :D

Shorts.... I refuse to comute bare-a$$ed

My fenders. I loves me some fenders.:love:
Seriously, I wouldn't ride up here without them because the road grime would be too much to take.

No question it's my Air Zounds bike horn. It's loud enough to get the attention of distracted drivers talking on their mobiles.....a true life saver.

Not long ago on my evening commute home I was at the intersection of a highway and smaller street. There is a four way stop light. I had the green coming from the smaller street. Some knuckle head wanted to blow the red light to turn from the highway to the smaller street. I blew my horn and he VERY quickly slammed on the brakes, whacking his head on the windshield. What an idiot......

Bike shoes.

Downsize that image! 288K for a thumbnail sized image is just WRONG! :eek:

The only useless item I commute with is the ATC-1000 video camera. Everthing else is essential during some part of the year and I can not commute without it.

Al

Prozac/Motivation

helmet

2 problems:

1) I do not have access to image adjusting tools at work, and the online ones I've seen are either blocked at work, or do not function properly. Remind me to make a PHP interface to ImageMagick soon. I use a PHP image upload thing to get stuff from my camera phone (or desktop) at work to my server. I might as well build some scripts to crop, scale, adjust color, contrast, etc.

2) Absolutely asinine Blogger limitation. It's not a thumbnail, the photos are clickable to show the full-size one, but it uses CSS to scale the images. Hey, I don't like it either.

Sorry...wrong page. The Park tool image is only 28K. But, I surfed over to your coffee page (click on , and noticed the image of your bike in front of Starbucks took a long time to load.

MS Paint (part of windows as long as I remember) re-saved theimage as 186kb (still too large)
And I am sorry that work blocks irfanview - a great program.
Alternately you use a Mac (or other OS?) plaform at work which I am surprised doesn't have built in editing SW given the marketing.

Al

I probably would come value most what I didn't have when I needed it, whether or not I had ever used it prior to that time or ever used it after (like a spare inner tube). However, the one thing that I take every day and use every day is the Ortlieb waterproof messenger backpack. I'm an "on the body" guy instead of an "on the bike" guy because I can go this way on the main bike or on the backup bike.

My MSPaint at work can only save BMP files. which would end up being megs instead of hundreds of K.

We aren't allowed to install third party software, nor are we allowed to hook our laptops or PDA's up to the network. There's no open wireless nearby that I can piggyback either. I have a laptop running OpenBSD, another one running Mac OSX (both with GIMP, an awesome image manip. tool), and several WiFi and ethernet-capable PDAs.

Anyhow, it doesn't matter anyways because the full res photo isn't that bad. It just so happens that with Blogger, there are no thumbnails, only scaled down images. I might have pulled it down to 800x600 or so, but that still would be a ridiculously ginormous file to be used in a 200 pixel-wide space on my blog.

My most valued thing will be my thorn resistant tubes on both my MTB and road bike. I hope I'm not jinxing myself, but I have never had a puncture or flat ever since I've installed them. The tubes have added some considerable weight to my bike but I thinks its worth it for the peace of mind of not worrying about flats anymore. I once pried out a shard of glass from my MTB. Sucker ripped throught the tire but the inner tube was barely scratched. :eek:

My favorite piece of gear is my Rapha jacket. www.rapha.cc. Hate to be borderline shilling, but that jacket is the bomb. Dead sexy, windproof, comfortable, high quality, fits perfectly; they thought of just about everything. Got it two Christmases ago and it is still going strong.

Appropriate audio hardware/software and good set of rear lights mounted high for maximum visibility.

Stainless steel vacuum thermos. No matter how cold, no matter what breaks, wherever I end up I've got good hot coffee with me.

How come nobody's mentioned a spare tube?

Probably because it can't do much without a pump and tire levers as well.