April 2026 – LoBall Bikes

What to bring

Your bike — any bike. Hybrid, mountain, road, cruiser, fixie, whatever. We’ve had cargo bikes. We once had a recumbent. You’re fine.

Lights — we ride in the dark half the year. Front and rear, no exceptions. If you don’t have them, come by the shop before the ride and we’ll sort you out cheap.

Water — it’s Tucson. It’s hot. Even in the fall it’s warmer than you think at 7 p.m.

Helmet — we’re not your mom, but we’d really prefer you wear one and we’ll say so.

A few bucks for after — see below re: the patio.

The route

We don’t pre-publish the route. This is on purpose. The route changes week to week based on construction, events, vibes, and whatever Dan or whoever’s leading that week feels like doing. It’s usually somewhere in the range of 8–14 miles and stays mostly on bike infrastructure — protected lanes, paths, quiet side streets. We’ve done the Rillito River path, the Julian Wash Greenway, the 4th Avenue to University corridor, the campus loop at night. We avoid highways and we avoid anything with sustained elevation gain on a Tuesday because that would be mean.

“The route is part of the fun. Not knowing where you’re going makes you pay attention to the city differently. You notice things on a bike that you’ve driven past a hundred times and never seen.”
— Dan

The patio

After every ride we end up somewhere with outdoor seating. Sometimes it’s a bar. Sometimes it’s a restaurant. Occasionally it’s someone’s front porch by accident. The patio is the actual point of the Tuesday Night Ride. The riding is great, but the part where you lock your bike and sit down and talk to people you just rode with — that’s the thing that keeps people coming back. We talk about bikes because that’s what we have in common. We also talk about Tucson, about work, about whatever someone read that week, about nothing in particular. It’s good.

First-timers: just show up at 6 p.m. on a Tuesday at the shop. You don’t need to tell us you’re coming, though you can if you want via the contact page or by calling 520-365-0754. Lock your bike out front, come in, say hi. We’ll introduce you to whoever’s there and we’ll roll when everyone’s ready. Bring a lock for the patio stop.

A few years back the shop had a cluster of yard signs in the window. You know the kind — the small corrugated plastic ones that list a series of values, formatted like a creed, all starting with “We believe.” They were well-intentioned. They were also, if we’re being honest with ourselves, performance. They cost us nothing and they said nothing specific about what we actually do. Anybody can put a sign in a window. We took them down.

The problem with performance

We’re not opposed to signage. The sign on our door still says what it says about who’s welcome and who isn’t. That sign is specific — it names something. The yard signs were different. “We believe in kindness” is not a commitment. It’s a vibe. A shop that discriminates against customers could hang that sign and it would be true by some reading. “We believe in science” doesn’t tell you anything about what we actually do differently because we believe in science. The signs had migrated from meaning into decoration, and decoration that signals virtue is worse than no sign at all because it lets you off the hook.

“The question isn’t what do you believe. The question is what do you do, specifically, on a Tuesday afternoon, when it’s hard or inconvenient. That’s not something a yard sign can say.”
— Dan

What’s in the window now

The front window of LoBall has:

The “Nazis Not Welcome” door sign, still there, still specific
A hand-lettered board listing the community organizations we currently donate to (updated quarterly)
A paper flyer for whatever community ride or event is coming up
A price list for our most common services, because transparency about cost is an act of respect for people who need to budget
Occasionally: a kid’s drawing, if a kid brought one in and it was good enough to go up

Less performance, more practice

The shift we’ve tried to make — and it’s ongoing, not finished — is from announcing values to practicing them. That means the free safety checks we do for anyone who walks in, regardless of purchase. It means the mechanic who takes 20 extra minutes with a customer who doesn’t speak much English to make sure they understand what we did to their bike and why. It means the price list in the window, because hidden pricing is a power move and we don’t want that power over our customers. It means the organizations on the board actually getting a check, not just a mention.

None of this makes us the perfect shop. We make mistakes. We have blind spots. We’re working on it. But the working on it is the thing — not the announcement of it. If you want to talk about any of it, you know where we are. Contact us here, or come by, or call 520-365-0754. The door’s open.

Month: April 2026

Tuesday Night Ride: a user’s manual.