I’ve been wanting to buy some saddle bags but i think these look so much better than shad. I just wanna know if these can be mounted or if anyone has done this before

https://preview.redd.it/8yds0x4mdq0d1.png?width=1482&format=png&auto=webp&s=92f6de754e519475997b6af36b838a95b80ae404
This might end up as a bit of a weird post. But mostly a very long one. I don’t think this place I’m presenting here is heaven, but without Suburbs Heaven Thursday this subreddit may give viewers the idea that we’re all just hating, and this case study may help illustrate some of the alternatives and what one could like and dislike about them. I know that yelling “the Netherlands!” on any urbanist platform is overdone and so 2 years ago, but I also feel like the available “Netherlands!” content is giving people an incomplete picture. So I’m going to discuss a suburban neighborhood, Lunetten, in Utrecht, where I’ve lived for about a year now. It’s a place built in the 70’s and 80’s, housing about 11,000 people in 5,500ish homes, for a density of just over 4,000 people/km², 10,000 per square mile.
Obviously that’s pretty dense. In a North American context Lunetten may count more as an example of the “missing middle” than a true suburb, but I feel it still works as a comparison because it is situated at the edge of a city* and it offers features people often look to the suburbs for, like a low noise environment, plenty of green and child oriented features. So, what can we find in this example that people may like or dislike in their suburban areas?
If you want to look along on your favorite online map: 52° 3'53 N, 5° 8'13 E.
Traffic and transit
Lunetten has a clear main road (middle left image, bright pink line on the map) that serves as the main way of getting around by car. It is the only road where the limit is 50 km/h (30 mph), not 30 km/h. The main road has priority over all side roads, indicated by the exits of all side streets being raised a bit. The speed bump automatically makes one slow down to yield to the traffic on the main road. In the places where people’s front doors open towards this main ring there are service roads for them to do their parking and loading and such on. In the busiest part of the ring the road was raised a few meters so pedestrians and cyclists can pass underneath through tunnels. So while the maximum speed cars can go on most of the roads in this place is quite low, the time to destination is pretty good, because a lot was done to ensure a good flow of traffic.
A more debatable feature is the lack of through-traffic options. If you want to leave Lunetten by car there are two roads leading West, connecting to the rest of the city and to the 70km/h raised road that serves as the exit from the city. There is also one small road going South-East along the train line, and that’s it. Despite being next to two highways Lunetten has no direct on- and off-ramp accessing it, and even no direct way across the highways for cars. Cyclists and pedestrians do have options leading in basically all directions. On the one hand this does wonders for how quiet the neighborhood is, but on the other hand that one road taking people in and out of the city is still more prone to blocking than a direct ramp to the highway, so car owners will experience some travel delays because of this.
Lunetten is no public transit hotspot, but there are like two bus lines both going to more connected places including the city’s central hub, and the train station is two stops from said hub as well, which happens to be the biggest train station in the Netherlands.
Public Spaces
Even by Dutch standards Lunetten has a pretty urban-ish density. There’s a mix of mostly rowhouses and midrise apartment buildings, mostly gallery flats up to 5 stories tall, including the ground floor. To give you an idea of Dutch standards for density: I grew up in a commuter town of about the same size as Lunetten, housing 1,000 less people (present day numbers) on roughly 1.25 times the surface**. But what I find interesting is what that space is used for. In Lunetten, on the outer ring of the neighborhood, adjacent to the two highways, busy raised road and train line that surround the neighborhood, there are quite sizable parks (bottom right picture). There’s plenty of space for dogs to run off their leash, there are football/play fields, there are two skate parks, two ponds for amphibians to spend the winter in (granted: that’s an amenity most people could live without) and an entire petting zoo, in case you had doubts this was a suburb. Together with a football/soccer club, a tennis club, some allotment gardens and a small business park near the train station these parks take up most of the space where traffic noise is an issue. There is room for recreation and other daytime activities in the noisy bits (there are sound screens, but that’s not blocking all of the noise) so that peoples’ homes can mostly be in the quiet parts, shielded from noise by trees and stuff. And then there’s the neighborhood interior. You’ll see on the map a few yellow locations marked as “playground/square”, but in reality many, probably most, of the dark green “courtyards” contain a little playground too. All of the courtyards have grass, most if not all of them have trees, many of those trees being taller than the midrises. Some of the courtyards feature parking space as well***. The middle right image is far from the greenest example. The combination of the parks and the courtyards make Lunetten much greener than the actual smallish town I lived in mentioned previously. Plenty of birds live here too, including a bunch of water birds who enjoy the ditches and canals. In the smallish town much more of the space was simply used for row houses with pretty large gardens, and in the newer parts a bunch of four home and two home units and free standing homes as well****.
Which brings me to the reality check. With all these pedestrianized public spaces around and loads of playgrounds, is Lunetten actually a good neighborhood to raise kids? From what I can tell, opinions are mixed. Because one thing that does tend to come with density of people is density of crime. In my year here I have personally witnessed a man snorting coke off his bicycle saddle, in broad daylight, in the middle of a bike lane near a skatepark with playing children in it*****. There is also the occasional lost shopping cart dumped in a canal and apparently there was a pretty shocking supermarket robbery just before I moved in. Especially if your budget only allows for an apartment and not a house I could imagine feeling a little scared to let young children wander around near the house on their own, also maybe because of the canals and ditches they might fall into. The sweet spot age for children in Lunetten is probably around 9-12, old enough to be trusted with their own safety around water and some minor drug use and vandalism, yet young enough to fully enjoy all the outdoor play space.
The blame for the crime is often put on the street pattern that is said to attract drug dealers and the like who love having good get away options, and the many green public spaces and nice dry apartment building entrances are certainly not the worst place a homeless person could go to for another night of hopefully not being bothered by the police. More recently developed neighborhoods have tried to avoid these effects by using a “cauliflower pattern” for their streets, branched streets ending in a bunch of (at least to cars) dead ends. The downside of that pattern seems to be less sense of community. The more direct neighbors you have, the more interaction. That’s why cul-de-sacs can be so isolating after all. Lunetten is not the worst crimey part of its parent city by a long shot, but it’s noticeable enough to be worth mentioning.
A planned neighborhood
The big advantage I think Lunetten has over a lot of other places is that it was designed in one go. The land it was built on was part of the Dutch Water Line******, and had to stay free of buildings and obstructions that would block the firing lines of defending artillery. (That’s what the two weird shapes in the northern park are: old fortifications, called Lunette 3 and 4. Hence the suburb’s name.) When the line was legally disbanded in 1963 Utrecht started planning to build a new neighborhood here. Because of the highways (current configuration built at the same time as the suburb) and the train line that surround the place it was very clear to where the neighborhood would stretch. And it shows. The suburb is designed as a cohesive whole. There’s a neighborhood shopping center (bottom left image and the main soft pink blob on the map) at the heart of the neighborhood. It has two supermarkets, some small other shops, several small fast food/lunch places in different styles, two bicycle shops and repair places (it’s the Netherlands), a restaurant (there’s another one on one of the forts in the park, which doubles as a sort of social work place), a community center which houses some clubs and such (not the scouts, those have a place in one of the parks) as well as a library. There’s even a bar (I think, I should maybe go there ones), and some space where small neighborhood markets and events turn up with some regularity. The other main soft pink and yellow blob in a convenient central location on the map is two elementary schools*******. In many more organically grown neighborhoods or places the amenities wouldn’t be so conveniently centralized or would eventually be “centralized” on the outskirt of town.
The Bijlmer comparison, what not to do
Another interesting point of comparison I think is the Bijlmer (Bijlmermeer officially) in Amsterdam, another green neighborhood designed as one big plan outside of its parent city’s core, yet quite different. The Bijlmer is nationally famous as a bit of a ghetto, a place where you don’t want to live. (To be fair: the plane falling down on it didn’t help its case.) A lot of work has been done to improve the place, but its initial “ghettoization” was surprising because the Bijlmer was never intended to even be particularly affordable, but more of a vertical suburb, spacious family apartments (around 120 m²) for 100,000 people or more in large highrise buildings with between them plenty of green. A quiet place, with quick access to the city, using density to save on land use and travel time. There are three main differences I see between the struggling Bijlmer and “doing pretty well” Lunetten: 1 The Bijlmer has a higher density through the use of massive apartment buildings, literally and figuratively increasing the distance between people’s homes and the public space. 2 The Bijlmer is a much bigger place, I’m not sure they ever got to those 100,000 inhabitants, but it certainly loses that towny vibe. 3 They’ve been correcting this in the rebabilitation, but as designed the Bijlmer had basically no amenities. It wasn’t a town or city, it was people storage, housing for people who mentally lived several kilometers away but couldn’t afford it there. See the rest of this subreddit for why that doesn’t work for many people.
Interdependency with other suburbs
Looking back on growing up in that smallish town I notice that there really isn’t that much of a difference in amenities. The town offered much of the same things Lunetten does. But Lunetten’s status as a suburb gives it a big advantage over that town. Because while suburbs mostly serve themselves, they also serve each other. Take sports: there’s a football and tennis club and two indoor sports halls in Lunetten, but what if I want to swim or throw spears instead? Well, there’s a pool in a suburb to the North, as well as an athletics stadium. After elementary school there’s no middle/high school in Lunetten, but there are in nearby neighborhoods, and there are even college options******** spread throughout different suburbs and neighborhoods. These things are closer than they are in a small town not because the suburb is associated with a city center, but because it is associated with other suburbs. There are things I liked about the commuter town, but having to take either an honestly too long bike trip or a bus ride that only went whenever it was not convenient for me whenever I wanted to do something my town didn’t provide, like going to school, wasn’t one of them. And I say that even as a spoiled person whose commuter town at least had buses and bicycle paths.
Conclusion
And that is I think the main takeaway from this absolute wall of text: suburbs don’t have to be places where there’s nothing to do and you feel disconnected from the world. That’s the entire point of living in a suburb instead of in a town: there are other places nearby. There is a balance to be found between private space, public space and connectivity. Essentially, in a neighborhood of 10,000 people, for every 100x100 meters of public space or amenities either every person gets 1 square meter less private space or everybody gets maybe a few meters of extra travel distance on the average trip. Lunetten probably provides too little private space for the taste of many North American suburbanites, but it does show I think that there is quite a bit of room on those sliders. A green place with amenities sort of near other places can still be built with more spacious houses. (Just maybe go easy on the sea of lawns?) And that’s when all the separated bike lanes and other urbanist talking points really start making sense: when you found the balance between having your own place, having local places worth going to and being close enough to other places worth going to, then you want a good way to get there.
The other takeaway I feel is that it pays to design neighborhoods as a unit. And that’s another reason why suburbs can be better than towns. A town of 10,000 residents can’t plan ahead for the next 10,000, but a city of several hundred thousand people can. And it pays off. Don’t lose track of the human scale though, planning 10,000 residents ahead might actually be better than planning 100,000 or 1,000,000 residents ahead when it comes to suburbs. It is still supposed to feel like a quiet little place with maybe a bit of its own identity.
* On the other side of one of the highways there’s a bit of forest tied to several historic estates that’s very nice for walking in as well as a golf course half as big as this entire neighborhood, this really is the edge of town and will be for the foreseeable future.
** I’ve also lived in several other cities since then, near the city center, further out and on the far edge in a highrise neighborhood. Honestly I might still prefer the smaller cities I’ve lived in, being near everything the city offers and even to some of the stuff outside of it. But work took me back to a larger city (pretend I said “less tiny” if you’re from Mexico City or something), and I could honestly have landed in a much worse place than this particular suburb.
*** Fun fact: this is one of the very few neighborhoods of Utrecht where parking is currently still free, because of enough parking space and enough distance to the city center. It really is a suburb.
**** In the 90’s a style of more expensive neighborhoods called “Vinex” set standards for the ratio of more expensive to cheaper houses in those neighborhoods, and ever since both contractors and local politicians refuse to let go of those ratios everywhere. A newer, competing vision is that we shouldn’t be building new neighborhoods at all, just filling in the gaps in our cities. So now we mostly build quite large houses, but only in very small spaces. We’re still not sure where that massive housing shortage came from, somehow.
***** I stopped and addressed him because I thought he was having bicycle trouble, chain ran off or something. Quite a chill dude, very apologetic, but still maybe not exactly what the average parent is looking for in a neighbor.
****** More accurately: Holland Waterline, because it wasn’t the only Dutch waterline, but it was the main one defending the part called Holland. But that sounds a bit off in English.
******* We have a bit of a weird school system, for every public elementary school there is at least one other founded on religious grounds or based on some specific didactic theory. That’s why there are two schools in the same central location instead of just one bigger school or two in separate locations.
******** If I start going into the differences in advanced education systems we’ll be here all day, but there are options within cycling distance ranging from trade school to university, depending on the field you actually want to study *********.
********* I could start using other symbols instead of these confusingly long rows of asterisks, but where would be the fun in that?

I have four ideas for End biomes, the mobs within them, their uses, etc, so, I'll be splitting the four of them into four separate posts to write and upload whenver I feel like. I'll paste the links to all of the previous posts in each so that you can go back and read them for context, if you want to.
And, also, here's two miscellaneous ideas that'll be imperative to understanding my ideas for each biome.
Hydrender
A dark purple liquid that resembles water and that generates exclusively in the tilt bogs (another End biome idea that I will have to write another post on). It can be bucketed or tubed, and flows just like water or lava.
It behaves similarly to water, but you'll swim 25% more slowly in it, and it's even cloudier than water, both looking into it, and swimming in it. You'll of course drown in it, unless you make a potion of hydrender breathing. (My hydrender bog post will get into how to make one.) Also, Endermen aren't hurt by it, and can and will swim in it, it evaporates in the Nether, and all aquatic mobs aside from guardians will die trying to swim in it.
Amethyst Tubes
These would esentially be purple test tubes (the kind you fill up with liquids, usually for experiments): an End equivalent of the glass bottle crafted with 3 amethyst shards. I picked amethyst because it not only matches the color scheme of the End, but it's already used to make tinted glass, and spyglasses, two glass related items. Plus, crystals are reflective in general.
Amethyst tubes can be filled with hydrender. Drinking a tube of hydrender will randomly teleport you, like consuming chorus fruit, only that no hunger will be retored.
These tubes' main use is for brewing new potions, which this four post series will get into.
The Melodic Forest
Anyways, right now, the "main" biome in the End is basically one giant forest of chorus plants. This is a sort of lackluster biome on it own, but a great building block for my idea for the melodic forest: a forest of several species of End plants.
I'm calling it melodic because all the plants here will be named after musical terms: verse plants, chorus plants, bridge plants, and chords.
Verse, Chorus, and Bridge Plants
I want to make it clear that these three plants are not trees, and, even then, aren't meant to be a copy of the Nether's giant fungi, either. They're bizarre succulent/cactus-like plants that can be used for food or construction, but not for helpful tools like sticks, crafting tables, etc.
Although, they'd all be around tree height, which is why I'm dubbing this biome a forest.
All 3 of these plants can be grown with verse, chorus, and bridge flowers on End stone respectively. When these flowers have stopped growing, there's a chance a new block: the melodic blossom, an expansive white-pedaled flower that can grow from any side of the chorus flower not linked up to the plant will grow.
Not sure what a melodic blossom could do beyond decoration, but maybe being able to place them on blocks other than what I'll dub "melodic flowers" would give builders tons of exciting ideas.
Verse Plants
The shortest and most common plant in this biome. They'd be a dark fuchsia/red violet in color, and tend to branch less than a chorus plant.
Verse fruit can't be eaten. Instead, brewing it with a hydrender tube will give you a void elixir. Void elixir is esentially the End equivalent of an awkward potion: the base ingredient for all main End potions.
When popping verse fruit in a furnace, you can then use it to make fuchsur (pronounced "few sure") blocks. This includes the blocks you can already make with purpur, but also doors, fences, gates, trapdoors, buttons, and pressure plants. Fuchsur, hence its name, would take on a fuchsia/hot pink look. Something like this, but maybe a bit more washed out to match purpur.
https://preview.redd.it/4wzb5bckso0d1.jpg?width=900&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e72e6f829bb2d298c6e2b703e0c627ad95124f89
Chorus Plants
These are mostly fine as is. They'd just be rarer in melodic forests to compensate for the abundance of verse plants, now grow melodic blossoms, and can be made into all the new building blocks I just described with fuchsur.
Bridge Plants
Like a standard song structure only has one bridge per song, only one bridge plant will grow on an island in a melodic forest. (Large melodic forests will of course have multiple islands.) They're substantially taller and thicker than chorus plants, forming what I'll call a "tornado shape". with their branches.
So, basically, when you try growing more and more flowers on the same chorus plant.
https://preview.redd.it/ewye97oito0d1.jpg?width=1280&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d436f9ed5e0f6b0cb79103a8d6babb3586bf2fc0
Not nearly as big as this example, though. Big enough to be bizarre and stand out from chorus plants, and, well, have the tornado shape, but not big enough to burn down your PC every time you try to cut one down. They'd be dark turquoise in color, kind of like Ender pearls or sculk.
Unlike verse fruit, you can eat bridge fruit. Eating bridge fruit will teleport you to the nearest bridge plant, effectively letting you eat them to "bridge" in the End. Unlike chorus fruit, this comes with an even longer cooldown of about 10 seconds. Just walk to the island's edge closest to where the nearest bridge plant is, eat a bridge fruit, and you'll be teleported to another island.
This is the main reason why only one bridge fruit comes per island, so it doesn't clog up your teleportation periphery with bridge fruit. However, you can hone in where you want to teleport by growing bridge plants nearby.
In my post for my idea for the obisidan cliffs biome, I will be detailing a way you can "acnhor" the spot you teleport to with bridge fruit without having any plants nearby.
While I'd argue this is easily the most useful melodic plant just from the fruit alone, you can also pop them to make turquor, which would give you dark turquoise/teal colored building blocks. They'd be about this color.
https://preview.redd.it/h9d59671vo0d1.jpg?width=750&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=69f4a9f6a8672bed8823ed3c8837f69376c35d99
So, that's 2 new building sets: fuchsur and turqur, to complement purpur.
Chords
Small, one block sized purple succulents that dot the melodic forest floor. Not much use beyond being decorative, but you could also put chords in flower pots.
Citrusite
A brownish orange stone that can be found in clumps within the melodic forest, and other End biomes as well.
Can be used as an alternative for stone for tools or furnaces, but can also be made into all decorative blocks that blackstone, deepslate, tuff, etc. can.
I'll be detailing a crafting recipe that requires citrusite in my obsidian cliffs biome post.
Alright. Time to get into mobs you'll find in this biome...
Well, actually, I think it'd make sense if they spawned in several End biomes, but they'd definitely be more common here, as it's more "hospitable", at leats in Ender terms..
Baby Endermen
Not a new mob per se, but rather a variant of a mob we already have. Unlike adult Endermen, they're not mature or skilled enought to teleport to the Overworld or Nether, so they'd stay in the melodic forests with their Ender parents, another new mob I'll get into. Also, they're not strong enough to pick up blocks.
If you look at, hit, or attempt to hit a baby Enderman with a projectile, they'll start shaking and crying, proceeding to teleport eratically like how baby zombies are even faster than adults. This'll cause them to make an awful screechy, whiny noise that'll alert all nearby Ender parents.
You're not meant to kill baby Enderman. Killing them will drop nothing, and will be rather hard with how often they'll teleport in comparison to adults. However, if you do manage to make one upset, there's a chance they'll cry, and drop a tear of Ender, textured similarly to a ghast tear, only purplish to reflect that it's made mostly of hydrender, not water.
A tear of Ender can be brewed with a void elixir to make a potion of Ender skin. This potions gives you the Ender skin effect, which lets you teleport away every time you're hit.
One giant catch, though. With Ender skin, you're also hydrophobic. If you get in water, it'll damage you, and you'll immediately teleport away. If you use this effect while it's raining, you'll probably die, or pray you get lucky enough to be teleported to safety. You can stand in hydrender with the effect just fine, though.
Ender Parents
Taller, bulkier, stronger variants of Endermen with even more health. (With a build more like the warden or iron golems.) Their black bodies would be covered in several protruding amethyst shards.
Normally neutral, but will attack you if you attack them, or upset a baby Enderman. They'll attack with normal hits, but can also pick up blocks and throw them at you, including common End blocks like End stone and citrusite. They'll destroy the terrain just as revenge for you upsetting their kids. And, given what dimension they're in, yes, they'll teleport. They're also hydrophobic like regular Endermen.
Upon death, an Ender parent will drop more Ender pearls than a regular Enderman, but also a few amethyst shards. This gives you another way to get amethyst shards to make tubes, but still incentivizes you to visit geodes if you want clusters for decorative purposes.
Drifts
(Yes, I took inspiration from Alex's Mobs for this.)
If you didn't know already, the strider was originally going to look like this at one point:
Sorry for the bad magic wand job
So, for the drift, why not have Mojang reutilize this model somehow? I think it sort of looks like a tardigrade.
Drifts would be darker purple colored tardigrades that spawn over the void in the End. (Any biome, not just the melodic forest.) Not sure if Mojang should give them four eyes, or no eyes. Either would be weird enough for the End, I presume.
Like striders, they're completely passive, and can be ridden over the void (instead of lava) with a saddle. Real tardigrades like eating algae, but, I don't think that's really fitting for drifts, given that they'd be about the size of pigs, and not microscopic like their real world equivalents.
You'd actually need two items to steer a drift: the chorus fruit on a stick and the bridge fruit on a stick. Chorus fruit on a stick will cause them to travel horizontally, and bridge fruit on a stick will cause them to ascend or descend, depending on what direction you're guiding them in. Since drifts are meant to be an "elytra lite", you'll need to find a balance between using the two stick items to compensate, and make sure neither break while over the void on a drift's back.
Even after you get the elytra, however, I'd like to think drifts would be pretty useful for exploring the underside of End islands, which I may write up my ideas on.
Drifts can be bred with bridge fruit. They can fly, though, so you'd best do it in an enclosed area so that none of your drifts escape.
My next writeup will be on my idea for the tilt bog biome.

Modifications in case of interest (these are on a p-line electric, front wheel drive.)

1. (2 photos). I wanted an extra (low-cost) bag to supplement my Brompton large front bag. It has to be simple, for folding & unfolding. Have a look through old rucksacks that have a soft carry-handle. This one fits over the saddle but clings to it rather than sliding right off. As the handle is then quite far back it’s unnoticeable when riding.

I trimmed the adjustable straps. With the bike unfolded I can hook them over the rack wheels for extra bag-stability. (The extender doesn’t make any difference to me.) To fold the wheels & saddle (shopping trolley mode) I just unhook the straps.

1. If you have a p-line electric you may notice that the front wheel sometimes comes unhooked when the bike is folded in shopping cart mode. Brompton have acknowledged this as a design fault and produced a new (longer, slimmer) hook. Your hook can be replaced under the guarantee so costs nothing.

See photos for full bike description.
Looking to buy my first tri bike for a full next year. Bike is listed for $2,200 USD.
I am 5’7” so believe this should fit, and have gotten a lot of helpful responses from the seller (sending videos, pointing out paint scuffs, etc).
I plan on getting a bike fit, my pedals, new saddle, and rear bike cage eventually. From online searching this price seems fair, but wanting other opinions!
maybe some damage on the headset? (See photo), some paint chipping, carbon wheels, rim brakes, mechanical shifting, and no power meter pedals