#Skating to Work

[crazy-updates]

Best Inline Skates for Urban Commuting in 2025

Urban commuting has evolved, and in 2025, inline skates have become a go-to transportation choice for those seeking efficiency, fun, and fitness all rolled into one. Whether you’re gliding past traffic jams, reducing your carbon footprint, or just wanting to inject some excitement into your daily commute, choosing the right pair of inline skates is crucial.

Why Inline Skates for Urban Commuting?

Before diving into our top picks, let’s understand why inline skates are such a brilliant choice for city travel:

Inline skates offer incredible speed and agility, allowing you to navigate busy streets and bike lanes faster than walking and sometimes even faster than driving in heavy traffic. Their lightweight nature makes them highly portable compared to bicycles, and their eco-friendly advantage contributes to a greener environment. Skating also provides a full-body workout that enhances cardiovascular health, strength, and balance. Plus, after the initial investment in a good pair, ongoing costs are minimal, making it a highly cost-effective commuting solution.

What to Look for in Urban Commuting Skates

Choosing inline skates for commuting isn't quite the same as picking skates for recreation or aggressive skating. For city commuting, prioritize comfortable boots for extended wear, durable wheels to handle urban roughness, excellent maneuverability for quick turns and stops, breathable materials to keep your feet dry, and shock absorption features to reduce strain from uneven surfaces.

Top Inline Skates for Urban Commuting in 2025

Here are the top contenders that balance all the critical elements for city skating:

FR Skates FR1 325

FR Skates are a staple for urban commuters, and the FR1 325 model is perfectly tuned for city life. It features a three-wheel setup (3x125mm) offering speed and stability over uneven surfaces, an adjustable liner for a customizable fit, a durable hard-shell construction that withstands urban abuse, and a secure closure system combining buckles, straps, and laces to keep your feet locked in. The FR1 325 skates provide smooth rolling with enough stiffness to handle city conditions while maintaining a comfortable, snug fit.

Powerslide Next 110

A popular choice among serious commuters, Powerslide's Next 110 combines durability and performance seamlessly. The skate includes the Trinity mounting system for superior power transfer and a lower center of gravity, a strong urban frame built to handle city landscapes, a heat moldable boot that achieves a custom fit, and large 110mm wheels that smooth out rough terrain while maintaining impressive speed. Powerslide Next 110 is ideal if you want to travel faster across town with less fatigue.

Rollerblade RB Cruiser

For those looking for a balance between affordability and performance, the Rollerblade RB Cruiser is a fantastic choice. It features a supportive hard shell that provides excellent ankle support, 80mm wheels for outstanding maneuverability and quick stops, a ventilated boot that keeps your feet cooler during long commutes, and a shock absorber built into the heel to reduce vibrations. This skate is perfect for short to medium-length commutes and offers great value for money.

Seba E3 80 Skates

Seba has always been a trusted brand for freestyle and urban skaters. The E3 80 Skates offer impressive features for commuters, too. They include a sturdy composite frame that is strong yet lightweight, a comfortable liner designed for all-day use, 80mm high-performance wheels that balance speed and agility perfectly, and an adjustable cuff ensuring proper ankle support and control. If you’re new to urban commuting, the Seba E3 80 offers great performance without overwhelming new skaters.

K2 Trio LT 100

K2's reputation for comfort is unmatched, and the Trio LT 100 brings that comfort to a city-ready package. These skates feature Softboot technology, making them feel like athletic shoes, 100mm wheels that provide speed without sacrificing control, a Stability Plus cuff offering a supportive yet flexible ride, and a lightweight frame ideal for carrying into the office or coffee shop. The K2 Trio LT 100 skates are perfect for those who prioritize ease of use and comfort.

Important Accessories for Urban Skating

Don’t just buy the skates — gear up properly! You’ll need a helmet as a non-negotiable for safety, wrist guards, elbow pads, and knee pads to protect against common urban falls, reflective gear to improve visibility if you commute early morning or late at night, and a skate backpack to carry your skates when you’re not using them.

Tips for a Smooth Urban Commute on Skates

Here are some of the best real-life tips you need to follow to be safe and healthy skating:

Plan your route - Scout routes with smoother pavement and fewer intersections. Parks and bike lanes are excellent choices.

Practice quick stops - Learn how to brake efficiently with your heel brake or by performing a "T-stop."

Stay aware - Always be mindful of cars, pedestrians, cyclists, and road hazards.

Wear proper clothing - Choose breathable, flexible clothing that won't restrict your movement.

Maintain your skates - Check wheels and bearings regularly and rotate wheels to ensure even wear.

Why 2025 Is the Best Year Yet for Urban Inline Skating

Technology improvements and the rise of eco-friendly urban transport have made 2025 a golden year for urban inline skating. With more cities investing in skate-friendly infrastructure and brands producing better gear than ever, it’s the perfect time to lace up and glide to work.

More cities are creating dedicated lanes and paths, making skating safer and more accessible. Some brands are even integrating tracking and performance apps into their smart skates. Overall, inline skating is a simple, personal way to contribute to greener living.

Make your daily commute the highlight of your day with the best inline skates for urban life in 2025. Whether you choose FR Skates, Powerslide, or Rollerblade, prioritize comfort, performance, and durability, then roll into a smarter, faster, and more exciting way to navigate the city. Now that you know everything about inline roller skates, it's time to choose your perfect pair! Explore the top-quality inline skates at Roller Skate USA, shop now, and start your skating journey today! Contact them via email or by calling 1-305-668-6001 & 1-786-252-7966.

[sco1i]

Watching skating videos in a platonic way

[heartorbit]

figure skating set right now please. thanks

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

What a lovely family portrait👨🏻‍👨🏻‍👦🏻🖼️

Enhanced image of A-Yuan's first sword flight.

[obsob]

bedtime story with my love !!

[kraftykelpie]

Codywan hugs!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

"Efficiency" left the Big Three vulnerable to smart UAW tactics

Tomorrow (September 22), I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy. Tomorrow night, I'll be in person at LA's Book Soup for the launch of Justin C Key's "The World Wasn’t Ready for You." On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine.

It's been 143 days since the WGA went on strike against the Hollywood studios. While early tactical leaks from the studios had studio execs chortling and twirling their mustaches about writers caving once they started losing their homes, the strikers aren't wavering – they're still out there, pounding the picket lines, every weekday:

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/08/09/how-hollywood-writers-make-ends-meet-100-days-into-the-writers-guild-strike.html

The studios obviously need writers. That gleeful, anonymous studio exec who got such an obvious erotic charge at the thought of workers being rendered homeless as punishment for challenging his corporate power completely misread the room, and his comments didn't demoralize the writers. Instead, they inspired the actors to go on strike, too.

But how have the writers stayed out since May Day? How have the actors stayed out for 69 days since their strike started on Bastille Day? We can thank the studios for that! As it turns out, the studios have devoted so much energy to rendering creative workers as precarious as possible, hiring as little as they can getting away with and using punishing overtime as a substitute for adequate staffing that they've eliminated all the workers who can't survive on side-hustles and savings for six or seven months at a time.

But even for those layoff-hardened workers, long strikes are brutal, and of course, all the affiliated trades, from costumers to grips, are feeling the pain. The strike fund only goes so far, and non-striking, affected workers don't even get that. That's why I've been donating regularly to the Entertainment Community Fund, which helps all affected workers out with cash transfers (I just gave them another $500):

https://secure2.convio.net/afa/site/Donation2?df_id=8117&8117.donation=form1&mfc_pref=T

As hot labor summer is revealed as a turning point – not just a season – long strikes will become the norm. Bosses still don't believe in worker power, and until they get their minds right, they're going to keep on trying to starve their workforces back inside. To get a sense of how long workers will have to hold out, just consider the Warrior Met strike, where Alabama coal-miners stayed out for 23 months:

https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/warrior-met-strike-union/

As Kim Kelly explained to Adam Conover in the latest Factually podcast, the Alabama coal strikers didn't get anywhere near the attention that the Hollywood strikers have enjoyed:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvyMHf7Yg0Q

(To learn more about the untold story of worker organizing, from prison unions to the key role that people of color and women played in labor history, check out Kelly's book, "Fight Like Hell," now in paperback:)

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Fight-Like-Hell/Kim-Kelly/9781982171063

Which brings me to the UAW strike. This is an historic strike, the first time that the UAW has struck all of the Big Three automakers at once. Past autoworkers' strikes have marked turning points for all American workers. The 1945/46 GM strike established employers' duty to cover worker pensions, health care, and cost of living allowances. The GM strike created the American middle-class:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-09-18-uaw-strikes-built-american-middle-class/

The Big Three are fighting for all the marbles here. They are refusing to allow unions to organize EV factories. Given that no more internal combustion cars will be in production in just a few short years, that's tantamount to eliminating auto unions altogether. The automakers are flush with cash, including billions in public subsidies from multiple bailouts, along with billions more from greedflation price-gouging. A long siege is inevitable, as the decimillionaires running these companies earn their pay by starving out their workers:

https://www.businessinsider.com/general-motors-ceo-mary-barra-salary-auto-workers-strike-uaw-2023-9

The UAW knows this, of course, and their new leadership – helmed by the union's radical president Shawn Fain – has a plan. UAW workers are engaged in tactical striking, shutting down key parts of the supply chain on a rolling basis, making the 90-day strike fund stretch much farther:

https://prospect.org/blogs-and-newsletters/tap/2023-09-18-labors-militant-creativity/

In this project, they are greatly aided by Big Car's own relentless pursuit of profit. The automakers – like every monopolized, financialized sector – have stripped all the buffers and slack out of their operations. Inventory on hand is kept to a bare minimum. Inputs are sourced from the cheapest bidder, and they're brought to the factory by the lowest-cost option. Resiliency – spare parts, backup machinery – is forever at war with profits, and profits have won and won and won, leaving auto production in a brittle, and easily shattered state.

This is especially true for staffing. Automakers are violently allergic to hiring workers, because new workers get benefits and workplace protection. Instead, the car companies routinely offer "voluntary" overtime to their existing workforce. By refusing this overtime, workers can kneecap production, without striking.

Enter "Eight and Skate," a campaign among UAW workers to clock out after their eight hour shift. As Keith Brower Brown writes for Labor Notes, the UAW organizers are telling workers that "It’s crossing an unofficial picket line to work overtime. It’s helping out the company":

https://labornotes.org/2023/09/work-extra-during-strike-auto-workers-say-eight-and-skate

Eight and Skate has already started to work; the Buffalo Ford plant can no longer run its normal weekend shifts because workers are refusing to put in voluntary overtime. Of course, bosses will strike back: the next step will be forced overtime, which will lead to the unsafe conditions that unionized workers are contractually obliged to call paid work-stoppages over, shutting down operations without touching the strike fund.

What's more, car bosses can't just halt safety stoppages or change the rules on overtime; per the UAW's last contract, bosses are required to bargain on changes to overtime rules:

https://uaw.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Working-Without-Contract-FAQ-FINAL-2.pdf

Car bosses have become lazily dependent on overtime. At GM's "highly profitable" SUV factory in Arlington, TX, normal production runs a six-days, 24 hours per day. Workers typically work five eight-hour days and nine hours on Saturdays. That's been the status quo for 11 years, but when bosses circulated the usual overtime signup sheet last week, every worker wrote "a big fat NO" next to their names.

Writing for The American Prospect, David Dayen points out that this overtime addiction puts a new complexion on the much-hyped workerpocalypse that EVs will supposedly bring about. EVs are much simpler to build than conventional cars, the argument goes, so a US transition to EVs will throw many autoworkers out of work:

https://prospect.org/labor/2023-09-20-big-threes-labor-shortages-uaw/

But the reality is that most autoworkers are doing one and a half jobs already. Reducing the "workforce" by a third could leave all these workers with their existing jobs, and the 40-hour workweek that their forebears fought for at GM inn 1945/46. Add to that the additional workers needed to make batteries, build and maintain charging infrastructure, and so on, and there's no reason to think that EVs will weaken autoworker power.

And as Dayen points out, this overtime addiction isn't limited to cars. It's also endemic to the entertainment industry, where writers' "mini rooms" and other forms of chronic understaffing are used to keep workforces at a skeleton crew, even when the overtime costs more than hiring new workers.

Bosses call themselves job creators, but they have a relentless drive to destroy jobs. If there's one thing bosses hate, it's paying workers – hence all the hype about AI and automation. The stories about looming AI-driven mass unemployment are fairy tales, but they're tailor made for financiers who get alarming, life-threatening priapism at the though of firing us all and replacing us with shell-scripts:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

This is why Republican "workerism" rings so hollow. Trump's GOP talks a big game about protecting "workers" (by which they mean anglo men) from immigrants and "woke captialism," but they have nothing to say about protecting workers from bosses and bankers who see every dime a worker gets as misappropriated from their dividend.

Unsurprisingly, conservative message-discipline sucks. As Luke Savage writes in Jacobin, for every mealymouthed Josh Hawley mouthing talking points that "support workers" by blaming China and Joe Biden for the Big Three's greed, there's a Tim Scott, saying the quiet part aloud:

https://jacobin.com/2023/09/republicans-uaw-strike-hawley-trump-scott/

Quoth Senator Scott: "I think Ronald Reagan gave us a great example when federal employees decided they were going to strike. He said, you strike, you’re fired. Simple concept to me. To the extent that we can use that once again, absolutely":

https://twitter.com/American_Bridge/status/1704136706574741988

The GOP's workerism is a tissue-thin fake. They can never and will never support real worker power. That creates an opportunity for Biden and Democrats to seize:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/18/co-determination/#now-make-me-do-it

Reversing two generations of anti-worker politics is a marathon, not a sprint. The strikes are going to run for months, even years. Every worker will be called upon to support their striking siblings, every day. We can do it. Solidarity now. Solidarity forever.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/21/eight-and-skate/#strike-to-rule

[mallalada]

are you ready for my rollergirl shadow agenda

[poppyseeds-and-coffeebeans]

I'm so excited to share this absolutely stunning masterpiece commissioned from the incredibly talented @bionic_xei for my fanfic Going for Gold!

🔵🟡⚫️🟢🔴

Please go follow Xei on Instagram @bionic_xei !!

And maybe check out my Sonadow fic <3

https://archiveofourown.org/works/61774105

[eggplantgifs]

Team Japan arrives in Paris for the Beijing Olympic Figure Skating Team Event medal ceremony! 🗼

[wolvesandshine]

I need more jock! regulus fics like he was also an athlete okay and he’s a black so he never does things in halves. I need regulus being buff or if not at the very least having the biggest sleeper build of all time. I need him to appear all calm and collected until his favourite quidditch team/football team is on then he goes crazy - he yells and screams and has zero filter. I need him to do workouts at home cause wdym he’s going to slack in the holidays he’s a black - just jock regulus guys

[its-a-beautful-day]

A donation doodle for @myexesallhaveguineapigs

Thank you so much for supporting me on Ko-Fi

[doozyfrog]

More recent WHA art!!!! + other stuff ^_^

[fuckyeahgoodomens]

jessica jurka of the denver colorado figure skating club has a free skate program themed to good omens!

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uLb4j95TC2M

awww <3

[shkika]

fun idea: w1 with roller skates (I thibk they would have fun)

YES THEY WOULD!!

learning to balance on them and exchanging commands would be entertaining!

[coline7373]

This is the real version but Tumblr is so unfriendly to landscape image I shortened it for easier viewing for those who just scroll by without clicking.

Enjoy a proper winter-y codywan 😉👍💖