Thanks so much for recommending that thread. So, the consensus seems to be that those straps are pretty awful (which is what they seemed like to me). Can I possibly just take them off the bike and use the regular pedals without them? Can I do this without hurting the bike? I know that then I'm not using all my muscles to spin, but I'm more concerned with not crashing in traffic right now. And this may seem stupid, but I'm not sure what the whole "clip/clipless" thing is. I'm assuming that the "clip" ones have spikes that clip into special shoes. Are clipless just regular petals, or is there something else? Sorry if that's already on here somewhere...