What is your definition of "Street" riding?

So if I wheelwalk, or one-foot downtown, I’m riding street?

David

do it along a wall, or down some steps and yeah your getting there…

how about one foot up to a low wall, hop on and wheel walk along the top, then unispin off…
that would make u a hero…

I think the problem with labling street unicycling at this point is its continual development. Currently there are very few true tricks that soley belong to street. Grinds, Footplants, and grabs are probably the most obvious developments that belong to Street riding. Because at this point there is a great deal of cross over between freestyle or flatland and street difficulties in defining what qualifies as a street trick, and what doesnt.

As it has been said another part of Street I believe is the urban enviroment and using anything and everything in it to do tricks off of as an ends being the trick, not the act of use of the props. This means anything that you would find in an urban situation goes, however man made objects like ramps fun boxes, and sandwich bordes are more of an element that would go into a park style riding. At this point in our sports development there is no differentiation between (skate) Park Riding and Street riding.

I feel that for most street competitions the term street is actually used incorrectlly, rather they should be called Park Comps

Sorry if I wasted your time,
Chex

Chex

what im getting from the definitions is that street is one bad cliche after another.

the best definition i have heard thus far is that street is skateboarding on a unicycle.

Eww. I hope we can do better than that. Skateboarding has two major advantages over unicycing. First, it’s easy to ride a skateboard, so anybody can pick it up quick. No, I’m not saying cool tricks are easy. But the first ten feet of riding a skateboard comes a lot faster than the first ten feet on a unicycle.

The second thing is that skateboarding is huge. Products, clothing, Tony Hawk, Televised competition, marketing, money! signs telling you not to do it. Unicycling is tiny by comparison.

By all other measures, I consider unicycling superior. We unicyclists don’t want to copy others if we don’t have to. And we don’t have to. Our sport is more challenging. It is newer, which can make it more exciting. The people who do it are more creative, and like trying new things.

Nothing against skateboarding (except all the runied rains and benches in public places), just that it’s not us.

So many great comments, and great quoting possibilities. Checkernuts said a lot of stuff, so more opportunities to quote:

There are no tricks that solely belong to street. It can all be done in Open-X or even Freestyle, provided the rider has the necessary props. But that’s not the point.

Street is definitely developing. But part of that development is figuring out what it is. By putting a label on we don’t want to say what riders can’t do, just what makes street different from other named forms of riding. Or to help design future competitions. Anything we define it as must leave room for growth in any direction.

I agree, except for the grabs, which came from Trials.

I would put forth that pretty much any trick can be a street trick. Just as any trick can be a Freestyle or Open-X trick. Flatland? That is the application of terminology from another sport onto ours. There is no such thing as unicycle flatland, until someone does what we’re doing here, and defines it. Or holds some competitions.

Isn’t that because skate parks are built to ride on, as an alternative to putting wear and tear on other stuff? In that sense, a skate park is an artificial street environment. To me it’s all street, but street can vary a lot depending on the type of place you’re riding.

Most? I don’t think there have been enough yet to count on one hand. I only know the details of the one we did at MUni Weekend, which was definitely not a “natural” street environment. We set up a number of trials obstacles to ride on, which I guess makes it more of a park setting.

But so what if it’s a park or the corner of 3rd and Main? The park might have much better stuff to ride on than 3rd and Main, so the fact that it’s a street does not make it superior. In fact, for purposes of liability, legality, and organizing competitions, a park or artificial environment has many advantages.

Here are some conclusions I have so far:

  • A trick is a trick. There is no such thing as a Freestyle trick vs. a Standard Skill trick vs. a street trick. It’s how you perform those tricks, or how you string them together that determines what kind of riding you’re doing.

  • Doing tricks on flat ground can still be street. But not all of them. If you’re in a competition and you only do stuff on flat ground, your low score will indicate it’s not “street enough!”

  • Street is about combining tricks and obstacles.

  • Just plain riding over obstacles can still be street, but if that’s all you do then it’s trials. Or boring street.

  • I boil it down, at the moment, to something like this. For it to be street, it can’t just be obstacles and can’t just be tricks. The overall performance has to be a combination of both.

  • I think most of you guys don’t know what Freestyle is. I will cover this in my next post.

I think he meant like tire grabs and the such. A lot of good points John.

David

Hey, yeah that was me. I’m glad you liked my part. However, in whatever video I’m in next, the stuff I did was pretty crazy. Go to http://www.gb4mfg.com and go to the sponsored riders section and to me. thats a picture of me doing a 180 down 8 stairs… and i landed it.

Kevin

Originally posted by johnfoss
There are no tricks that solely belong to street. It can all be done in Open-X or even Freestyle, provided the rider has the necessary props. But that’s not the point.

That is part of the point with street, It belongs in urban areas, This is what Kevin means when he says street is more than just riding and it is more a lifestyle. Using your natural enviroment in a creative way is different than having a contrived enviroment that suits a paticular riding style to perform trick. This is hard to explain but basically it comes down to each individual riders ablity to see different things in the same settings and using objects that appear in urban settings.

To make the argument that open x or freestyle is the same old tricks is to make the arugment that all muni from XC on fire roads to North Shore style Downhill are the same.

By all other measures, I consider unicycling superior. We unicyclists don’t want to copy others if we don’t have to. And we don’t have to. Our sport is more challenging. It is newer, which can make it more exciting. The people who do it are more creative, and like trying new things.

We don’t need to be eleitist now do we?
Go watch this video of Rodney Mullen and then If you honestlly feel this way, go put money where your mouth is and try go learn to kickflip a skateboard. If I am mistaken and you already know the skills required to do this basic skateboarding trick, then I salute you in finding a sport that is better than all others for yourself, but please dont degrade others abilities by calling them out as infearior.

Your statement on uniqueness and a degree of authenticity found in unicycling I also find flawed. There is nothing unique or authentic in this world. These traits are a product of industrialization. In looking back to a time of nestalgia where things are uniqe you are forgetting that unicycling comes from bicycling in the first place, our whole community is borrowing off of another one in sheer existance.

You don’t have to be in an urban setting to do street either. You can do street moves on a muni trail. It’s all about how you control the uni, and how you find obstacle to use as props for moves.

asking “what is street”? is like asking “what is an orgasim”? You can describe the mechanics of it, but words are not strong enough to convey a complete discription to those who haven’t experienced it first hand (pun intended).

John,
you are overanalysing “street”, you won’t understand it by thinking. If you really want to know what street is, then go out and do it. You will know when you “get” it. Though I dout you will get it.

Street is not limited by: type of unicycle, tricks or no, obsticles or no, concrete or no. Types of unicycling that you are used to, can easily be labled by a certain type of: uni, riding, obstacles, and other people (watching you, or competition).

mike

[QUOTE]
Originally posted by johnfoss
[B]The second thing is that skateboarding is huge. Products, clothing, Tony Hawk, Televised competition, marketing, money! signs telling you not to do it. Unicycling is tiny by comparison.

We get lumped in with “No Skateboarding” and rightfully so, we do as much or more damage to public/private property, and get kicked out of any places where “No Skateboarding” is posted. Skating is faster. Skating takes less effort for foreward progress. Skating has parks built specificly for it. skateboarders can jump massive gaps using only momentum. It is easy to find someone to skate with. theres 4 more things off the top of my head.

[QUOTE]

By all other measures, I consider unicycling superior. We unicyclists don’t want to copy others if we don’t have to.

LIES!!! I consider street unicycling to be Skating’s half-retarded younger brother. If we didn’t “copy others” we wouldn’t be grinding (the thought would never have crossed anyone’s mind), and we wouldn’t be doing grabs. There is nothing wrong with copying another activity, we are using things established skateboarding and bmxing to have more fun on a unicycle. Watch an 80’s bmx video. in the 80’s, bmxers where doing trick that look a lot like tricks unicyclists are doing now (not counting street riding). bmx started to copy skating, and that road lead to the progress that brought you what bmx is today.

mike

I agree with onetrack (mike). if you want to know what street is about, you cant be told. if you want justification for putting wax on marble ledges and “ruining” benches, it probably cant be told to you. however, if youre out there riding, you will feel everyright to move that bench anywhere you want and put on a lot of wax and slide on it as many times as you want. its a feeling you cant explain. an ambition i guess. i dont know. then again, i doubt everyone can understand street by riding it. you have to want to do it i think. thats where the lifestyle and attitude of street come in. its far more complicated than all the other types of riding. but im glad that its becoming more popular!

Kevin

And so we come we full circle to my original point…

you dont set out to ride street, you ARE street.

how many of you street riders wear a helmet? maybe sometimes when you go for something really big (which is another trait of being a street rider: the desire to push it) you will the first time.

as for rails and ledges getting destroyed… thats all part of street… like graffitti… (do any unicyclists ‘tag what they trick’? be honest now) we are destructive people, both internally and externally… why protect your wrists when breaking them is all part of the adventure… the fear… and casts look cool.

we want to be banned from public places, we want to be outcast, we want to get hurt… maybe not conciously but you need that little bit of punk other wise youd be in a helmet and cycling shorts and doing trials…

on another aside… do any of you street riders want to collaborate on a pure street video? im doing the uk vid at the mo, but i could run another along side, cos the one im doing is mostly trials, and the none street unicyclists dont seem to appreciate the stunts in my videos that are so much a part of 1) other street sports (look up bam margeras cky) and 2)how me and my friends live

as for flatland… that is a term applied specifically to BMX freestlye, but goes well with unicycle freestyle to (like in the soleternity bit in UNiVERsE 2) freestyle skateboarding would appear to come under the flat land ideal, but is called … freestyle skateboard… and as for roller blading… well who cares? if your street p!ss on them like everyone else… if your a none street unicyclists, berate me for hating them for the lack of effort they put into theyre sport and their attitudes in skate parks…

skateboarding is cool, but unicycling IS harder… give us 20 years to catch up and we’ll be better than them too

Sorry I mentioned skateboarding. No disrespect for high-level skaters. Just the ones I see wherever I go. They never seem to land anything, they think wearing pads will make them weaker, and there seems to be a lot of posing going on. I suppose as unicycling gets bigger we will have more of this ourselves.

But I said my next post would explain more about Freestyle. If you want to know in detail what freestyle unicycling is, you can look it up in the rulebooks (links at the bottom of my posts). So when I talk about Freestyle, that’s what I am describing. The thing that separates Freestyle from other forms of “doing tricks” is that it’s 50% Difficulty, and 50% Presentation. It’s not just tricks, and has more of a theatrical component than any of our other forms of unicycle competition. This element is generally not considered in the BMX and skate-inspired stuff we do, or in Open-X, and especially not in Standard Skill.

So when you say Freestyle, remember you’re talking 50% Presentation. That includes “style” and many other elements, such as choreography, facial expressions, arm movements, music and costume.

If we had a Flatland event in unicycling, it would probably be something like Freestyle without the Presentation aspect. Or maybe a little of it, but not a full-on 50%. That’s basically what Open-X is. We want competitors to show some personality and style, but we are not judging their music and costume, or other more theatrical elements of the performance.

North has painted a picture of the counter-culture unicyclist. We don’t all fit his mold. In fact I think most of us don’t:

Around here we call that being homeless :slight_smile:

Some of us are not street. Yet we can still ride street. We are perhaps less “street” than you. But we might be more in other areas, such as track.

So does this suggest that proper street does not involve helmets? Helmet or no, street is something you do with a unicycle, and/or a mental attitude about it. If it includes not wearing helmets, it will stunt the growth of competitions.

I hope that no form of unicycling is ever like grafitti. You want to make tags? Please do them on your own house only. Preferrably on the inside.

Same goes for destruction of public property. I don’t want to get side-tracked into a discussion of use vs. abuse here. Use is fine, abuse is bad. That’s one of the reasons skate parks were created. You can be a destructive person, that’s fine. It’s all part of growing up, or being human. But just destroy your own stuff, okay?

I’m sorry. You are trying to attach “baggage” to street that a lot of us don’t need. Please keep it separate. Every time you enjoy yourself getting banned from a public place, you get all the other unicyclists banned as well. Pretty selfish.

You can have a “go for broke” attitude about any form of unicycling, and about most other things. It is not a requirement of your riding style.

Several people mentioned that it’s somehow impossible to define street, or that if you don’t know what it is, you’ll never understand. Motorcycle riders say “If you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand.” Certainly there is an element of just doing it and enjoying it. But perceptions are different for each individual, so that’s always going to be one of the more etheral (hope I used the right word) elements of street.

Our object here is not to be perfect, but to get a better understanding of what street means to the various people out there. I can even respect North’s version, minus the grafitti, getting banned, destruction of property and broken wrists.

I think what I was getting at in the original post was to get a better idea of what a street competition would be like. That’s going to usually require some sort of artificial “street” environment. Any comments on that?

Though you could do an informal street comp on real street corners, it would be much more difficult to do a large, meaningful competition there without tons of red tape, insurance, etc. But if there are to be sponsors involved, those things are required. That’s why an artificial environment is usually used for these types of competitions. What should it include?

That brings up the point that the name is just a name. One must not assume that freestyle skateboard is anything like freestyle unicycling, as what the judges want is probably very different. What we need to do is define what we want street to be in a competition sense.

I think north is taking his opinions a little too far, although i know many skateboarders with this attitude as well. as for the competition sense of a street competition… you need stairs i think. like 6, 7, or 8 sets in order to get an actual separation of the skills of people. also, things to grind are absolutely necessary. footplant areas and ledges to grind are needed too. i mean its almost impossible to find a place like this, but if you did, it would be absolutely perfect. theres a place in my city that would be decent, its in a circle. we call it “the circle” lol. so i dunno, its tough to do in an actual “street sense”. but as for helmets… i think in a street competition, helmets should be necessary. i mean if we are promotiong the sport in a competition, then i think helmets should be worn just for a positive image, as well as insurance reasons. even if we dont wear them when we are actually riding. anyways, those are just my thoughts.

Kevin

I hope I’m not jacking the thread, but…

What type of unicycle do you all consider ideal for street riding? I know most of the top riders just use standard trials unis, though some people mentioned 24". Onetrack mentioned that the type of unicycle doesn’t matter, but surely some would have advantages over others.

Whenever I try street-esque tricks, it’s always on my 24" muni cause that’s the only one I have that can stand up to the abuse. I imagine 24" is better on half-pipes/ramps, though a 20" would be less cumbersome. Also, wide trials tires seem to be the norm, but most BMXers use tires like Primo the Wall and others that we use for plain ol’ freestyle. Would a “freestyle” tire be adequate/better for street riding?

yeah you are jacking the thread… but everything has been said about it.

biggest problem with 24"s are that you cant really unispin them.
maybe 180s and rarely 360s but certainly not as easy as a 20".

24s" are cool becasue you should be able to huck yourself heaps far across gaps and over stuff

unicycling has already been lumbered with all other street sports and the counter culture attitude will be applied to you no matter who you are, because you are enjoying something and exercising freedom of expression and people dont like to see that so you are already banned from all the no cycling/skating/blading places. some of us enjoy the counter culture associations, some guys i break with had a plan to get breakdancing banned from public places (by getting in peoples way with a beat box and piece of lino mostly) because they felt that being shunned by society gave them legitimacy. the opinion i gave of street above, maybe somewhat exaggerated as it stands, but there will come a time in the future when the counter culture is as heavy for Street unicycling as it is for every other “extreme” sport.

as for street competition, it will have to take the form of any other sports “street” competition on a man made course, with helmets etc for the insurance (which is perfectly acceptable because wen u ride for yourself, you make your own choice, but when u ride in a competition, other ppl have to be protected), but i dont think current unicycle technology would hold up to normal skate park style street courses, because you cant have that flow. steps, drops, rails, quarters, grind boxes, ledges, gaps, are all necessary, but how many of us could maintain that flow constantly, trick after trick with out setting up, for 2minutes plus? its hard enough on a bmx…
i think the best you could hope for in a street competion at this stage is a kind of expression session, or best trick if you will, with one obstacle, say a set of stairs, and maybe a few runs at it each, to see whose got what.
or maybe a sort of boarder x course, with a slight downhill and a section of obstacles in rapid succesion, one run being from top to bottom, with points being awarded for lines chosen and tricks pulled along the way. (i’m quite pleased with that idea actually, it would be unique to unicycling!)

a 24" isnt really much better for half pipe btw, cos the extra torque isnt really enough,especially to compensate for the lack of maneuverability and the fact that the curve of the ramp is designed for 20" wheels and smaller.