They say hindsight is 20/20, and in retrospect, Baltimore Velo was launched while Baltimore City was on the cusp of a cycling explosion. It’s easy to forget that when we started in November of 2010, the cycling scene was quite splintered in Baltimore. There were many niche blogs, cycling teams and different kinds of riders, but there was no one-stop source that aggregated all of the cycling news in Baltimore in one place.
Baltimore Velo was created to present all of that information in one website.
Velo started out with three of us—myself, Arne and Liam. Our beginnings were a little rocky and all over the place, but that gave the site a certain unpolished charm. There were a lot of columns back then that haven’t been updated in years – the Baltimore-Specific (BS) Reviews and the Best Rides in Baltimore series come to mind. It certainly didn’t have the cohesive formula that it eventually achieved.
We aimed to update on the daily, and back then, it was tough! You have to remember that the scene back then was a small portion of what it’s become since. But with Liam and Arne riding around all-day, every day, we made it work. They were great at snapping photos of new bike lanes and reporting from the street.
Meanwhile—and I don’t know how many readers know this—over the course of Baltimore Velo, I’ve had 3 arm surgeries. I supported the site by always doing my best to make sure we posted daily, like clockwork.
As you can probably imagine, updating this site when I was out of the saddle for 6 months at a time sometimes made me want to throw my computer out of the window. I never did, and I am proud of the work the three of us have accomplished in two and a half years.
I’ve forged new friendships through this blog, gotten a press pass to Interbike that I never used, threw a Halloween race, checked out the Bishop Bikes workshop, road tripped to Trexteltown and the Philly Bike Expo, and more than anything, have been humbled at having a voice in this small community.
Or should I say, large community. I have been truly blessed to witness firsthand the absolute explosion of cyclists here in Baltimore. We now have a bike advocacy group, and no one—I mean no one—would have thought that we were anywhere near having the community to support one in November, 2010.
And during Baltimore Velo’s prime, we succeeded at our goal of consolidating all Baltimore cycling culture into one finely-packaged, definitive source.
Unfortunately for me, two and a half years is sort of a long time. Arne has since stopped contributing to the blog, while Liam skipped town to pursue a photography career in New York.
(What assholes.)
That left only me for a long time. Almost a year now, in fact. And although at one point it was never too difficult to keep Velo up to speed on the bike culture here, we now have the unique problem of too much bike culture for one person to cover.
For the past few months, this site’s quality has been steadily degrading. That fact has been eating away at me. I’ve wrestled with the idea of ending Velo over that period, and I’ve decided that I can no longer support the site to the extent that I’d like to.
I would rather put an end to it rather than tarnish the site itself.
So this is it. Thanks to everyone who has read Baltimore Velo over the past two and a half years. This site meant a lot to me, Liam and Arne, and to the thousands of you who have bothered to read what we wrote, your readership made it worth it to update the site, even when it was a pain in the ass to do it.
This isn’t the end for me. I’m sure I’ll blog over at the Bikemore blog, and you might even catch me contributing on B’more Bikes, which has officially dethroned us lately.
Thanks again.
- Seth
Originally posted at Baltimore Velo. All content is © Baltimore Velo unless otherwise noted.
