Tip 96: Lingo

Clothing you would previously have "worn" should now be rocked, as should gear you may once have merely "used."
Remember, the first guy in the group to refer to his bike as a whip seemed like more of a douche than the last one.  If everyone else is using language that seems way too cool, you can too.

BONUS TIP: If you want the bros to think you're tight, saddle up, hipster.  Jargon binds groups.  Don't go wondering if abandoning your integrity is "right".  Thinking like that will make you the weird one nobody feels like talking to.

Tip 94: Delay essential maintenance

After a while you think of that funny noise as good company, like the footfalls of a troupe of Hobbits with whom you are merrily crossing the Shire, drinking wine from flagons.

BONUS TIP:  It's procrastination.  If you only ever ride to the bar to meet hot ladies, smoke a pipe and eat goulash while throwing darts, bicycle maintenance will continue to run a distant second.
Schedule a trip to your financial adviser.
(Or - if the reason you can spend all day at the bar is that your financial affairs are in order - to your dentist).

Tip 87: Ride with no hands

A few things your 14 year old self was proficient at adult you cannot do.
Eating whole packets of skittles is one of them, as is wagging class and having faith in the political system.
In this illustrious company is riding with no hands.
14-year old you depended on this daring display to compensate for the total absence of other ways to impress the opposite sex, as well as to facilitate eating skittles while riding.
The adult cyclist clings to the bars like their jobs, superannuation and home-owning aspirations depend on it.

BONUS TIP: No hands riding is like baking a diamond into your Christmas pudding. You might break a tooth, but you'll feel so much richer.

Tip 80: Ride sauced

At .05: Consider the application of drink driving statutes to two- wheeled vehicles.
At .10: Consider riding with no hands and/or bunny hopping road furniture for lols.
At .15: Consider riding with one eye closed, so there are no longer two of every car you pass.
At .20: Consider whether, if the pros can ride and eat without stopping; you might be able to ride and spew.
At .25: consider how impressive it would be if you rode home nude, like Mario Cipollini.

BONUS TIP: UBIs - or unidentified beer injuries - are the police, judge and eventually the 12-step program for the habitually pissy cyclist.

Tip 70: Register your dissatisfaction with the local bike-share scheme

 
Why not take a bike?
Because the law says I need a helmet, and I don't #@%&ing keep one in my top pocket!

BONUS TIP: Urban Riding Tips does not condone destruction, Melbourne. Contact your local MP, or more effectively - just keep not using them.  Something's gotta give.

Tip 66: Feel abnormal

You've just emerged from a big meeting and stand by the road shaking hands with important men in very fine suits. They stand on the side of the road looking for taxis. 
Your bike is right there, but you suddenly feel an absence of pride in it, the presence of a sort of weirdness.  Is this shame? 
Do you take the four steps to where your bike is locked and mount it, or wait til they have gone? What will people think?

BONUS TIP: Revel in bike-shame while it lasts. Way things are going, it's something the fixie-buyers of today will never experience.

Tip 63: Sweat

Park your bike and ride the lift up without changing your clothes.
You feel warm but tell yourself you are socially acceptable.  That sprint over the last two kilometres is forgotten.
Inside your climate-controlled office, you swifly turn red and sex-like.  Your shirt sticks to your spine, your face feels hot and your lips are salty.

BONUS TIP: When you go to the morning meeting, put on your jacket to hide the dramatic armpit stains from the women in marketing.  
Soon your entire body is clammy like a diptheria patient.  Before its your turn to speak, your eyebrows will fill with drips that fall on and ruin the notes for your presentation.

Tip 57: Browse for a new bike

On eBay, gumtree, craigslist, you can ponder what it would be like to have a whole new cycling identity.
Ride a $45,000 sculpture made exclusively of carbon atoms taken from the ankles of Milanese catwalk models and grafted together by a direct descendant of Michaelangelo himself.
Or spend $29 on a Huffy that has clearly been left in the rain since it was last ridden in 96. "tiers need sum air - othrwise perfct!"

BONUS TIP: A bike been ridden "once" has been ridden >50 times.  Small scratches on the downtube are major structural weaknesses.  A 2009 model is a 2004 model.

Tip 48: Try mountain biking

Trees are the cars of mountain biking, but if one collides with you, it's harder to get your buddies to back you up that it wasn't your fault.

BONUS TIP: squirrels are the pedestrians of mountain biking - constantly emerging from nowhere and risking their skinny mammalian necks. Big jumps are the police cars of the forest - audacious riding will be punished and meekness rewarded. Swallow your pride, rookie. Dismount and walk past, if you have to.

Tip 29: Stop in front of someone who's stopped in front of someone

Who are these douche-bags? Is that a dutch bike?  Look at that guy's fringe! 
I reckon I can take him when this light turns green.  
I'll just stop here in front of the pedestrian crossing so I can take off first. 
etc. etc. ad infinitum.

BONUS TIP: Fundamentalists may get away with this manoeuvre on the basis that the reverse line-up, or shoal formation, is condoned in Scripture. 

 But many who are first will be last, and the last first. - Matthew 19:27-30

Even if you have the fish sticker on your bike, you will need to possess pretty sharp acceleration to receive forgiveness for this act.

Tip 22: Hang your helmet on your handlebars

The first people to dangle stack-hats from their Oury-brand grips were a small group of History Professors.
They had read how Hernan Cortes, on arriving in Mexico, had his men burn the boats they  arrived in.  Removing the safety net meant his soldiers would brook no retreat. 
These wise professors saw a parallel in cycling.
Perhaps it could be made safer in a counter-intuitive way.  Your head, they reasoned, is the soliders and your helmet the boats, with their false promise of security.
(Of course, your handlebars are the flames and the road an angry phalanx of Aztec warriors).
Around the holly-oaked lanes of Oxford, untold dozens of injuries to some of the most valuable heads in academe were avoided through this time tested logic.

BONUS TIP:  One unpropitious spring day a history professor revealed the helmet strategy (and its historical antecedent) to some Business school faculty over scones at College. 
The Business School professors started spruiking the historical lesson in their flimsy best-sellers on the strategy of business and copied the helmet routine to boot.
The only time Oxbridge neurology wards got any work was when a business professor and a history professor both rounded a corner in the gloaming, and collided.
The boat burning strategy can't work if both sides do it.

Tip 21: Get overtaken by a faster cyclist

Getting overtaken is like milk - it comes in two forms. One cold and easy to digest, the other lumpy, sour and makes you choke.

Type 1 is over before it began. Before you know a blur in your peripheral vision resolves into a lycra clad ghost that disappears over the horizon. You barely have time to register a pair of tightly defined calves moving like hairless metronomes before they're gone.

Type 2 is slow. The sound of grinding gears approaches. There is breathing. You may speed up, to discourage a pass, you may slow down to expedite it.  It matters not.  After what seems like forever, the (slightly) faster cyclist takes their chance and moves ahead, torso twisting violently as they push their plastic pedals, sweat evident on their brow.  

They make slow progress on increasing the gap, leaving you to catalogue a million reasons you aren't going fast today.

BONUS TIP: Of course you can remind yourself it's not a race. But you'll gain about as much satisfaction as from tickling yourself.

Tip 17: Get Gloves

Scene: You, hands in pockets, waiting at lights on a Very Frosty morning.

Fully Kitted Middle-Aged Man who rolls up behind you: Cold hands eh?

You: Hm?

FKMAM: I see you have cold hands!

Y: Oh. Yeah. It is a bit cold!

FKMAM: I don't know how you do it without gloves!

Y: I've been meaning to get some. Mumble.

FKMAM: I ride so much, I've got three pairs, thin, medium and these ones.  I look out the window each morning and decide which ones to wear.

Y: Really?

FKMAM: It's also good if you fall off cause otherwise you'll take all the skin off your palms.

Y: Oh yes.

FKMAM: You should get some.

Y: Sure.

FKMAM: Promise me you really will.  It sounds like you're just saying you will.

Y: *watching desperately for light to change*  OK, OK!

BONUS TIP:  You are going try to burn off FKMAM when the light goes green. Do not fall. Your pride can't take it.

Tip 13: Smack bad cars

Like you are a repressed English public schoolmaster and they are your delinquent pupils.

BONUS TIP:  There will not be detention for profanity.  Cut loose.

Tip 9: Put stuff in your spokes

Fuck decoration.  The rumour putting the "pst" back into hipster is that spokes are the new panniers.  Credit cards, cash, Hello Magazine,  french textbooks, an iPad, CDs, and sachets of Tang have all been spotted. Form follows function.

Bonus tip: Packed lunch.  A pita bread sandwich with Kraft Singles might fit in there.

Tip 8: Fall off on wet metal

You have drips in your eyes and a big stripe up your back.  A slippery feeling between your toes as your croc loafers prove less waterproof than the animal they're made of.  It's dim, and there's a mirage effect as headlights gleam up from the road.
You're on the brakes the whole time.  You are super careful, slow and steady, alert to cars stopping distances, studiously avoiding puddles of unknowable fathom. 
Until you get within a street of home and you lean into a corner.
Oh! That manhole cover must be new.
When the asphalt rushes up to caress your cheekbone it feels like a rusty razor found way down the back of the bathroom cabinet. Your trousers tear like tissue paper as you slide. It ends when you are lying still, feeling like you are taking a cold gritty bath with your bike.

 
BONUS TIP: If you are spread-eagled on a tram track, ignore the holes in your Lee denim and put a finger to the track.  If the steel is thrumming, you are about to be turned into strawberry jam.  Move!

Tip 7: Ride a Folding Bike

In your cupboard: undies, ironed and folded. 
In your top pocket: a clean handkerchief, folded exactly.
A pair of those folding glasses balancing on your nose. 
Beneath you: a Brompton or Dahon, its tiny wheels spinning as you head from the origami school where you work to your weekly poker game, where you won't play a hand all night...

BONUS TIP: From here, the only way to multiply your "adorkability" is to make this your party trick.

Tip 6: Change your tire with a knife (multiple tubes necessary)

Those bike shops are always reaching deeper into your pockets. You go in to buy a handful of spokey-dokes, and you come out with a french-made, full carbon bottle cage that costs as much as your bike.
The worst is the things they put on the counter to tempt you: Patch repair kits that cost more per gram than truffles, and those tyre levers - which are just bits of moulded plastic - for $29.  You won't fall into that trap!
And then it's time to change that tube, so you go into the kitchen and find the bluntest looking butter knife. The risks here, as you put the tyre back on over that virgin tube, are evident, so you exercise extreme caution.
Pump it up, and listen.
Fssssssssssssssssss.

BONUS TIP: When you go to the shop to buy a half-dozen replacement tubes, accept that your pride won't let you spring for the tyre levers just yet. 

Tip 5: Hang onto a tram

Public transport is taxpayer funded.  Even if you've cleverly engineered your financial circumstances to minimise income tax - by, say, becoming a video installation artist - you still pay tax. All those daily transactions involve a greasy government middle-man taking his GST.
Every pair of Vans includes $10 that goes straight to the government. Every soy latte is another 35 cents jangling in the taxman's pockets.
Don't imagine you've lost those precious pennies just because you are a cyclist.  Public transport is there for you.  Hang on tight as the number 96 ascends Bourke St. You deserve it.
The newer trams are more of a struggle for hand holds as The Man tries to shut the humble cyclist out, but anyone with rock climbing experience will be able to stick a digit in a crack, stop pedalling and benefit from propulsion they already paid for.

BONUS TIP: Wanna prove you've got the juice in your caboose? Take your mountain bike onto the train tracks and hang onto the 9.15 running express to Richmond.

Tip 4: Run a Red

Colour blindness afflicts men more than women.  Keep that factlet in your back pocket.  Cause if you cycle properly eventually you'll be having a little chat about the rule of law with some uniformed  protozoa with father issues.
He won't appreciate your perspective on the way the nanny state oppresses, so get all sciencey on his arse. How can you have known what colour that light was with your debilitating disability?
Even if it doesn't stop you getting the old baton to the back of the knees, you'll be able to crumple to the ground aware you've given him the sort of knowledge that distinguishes him from his peers and all but locks in his next promotion.

BONUS TIP: A lady cop just needs a wink from an outlaw and it'll be her going all weak at the knees.