Strida update and more

I haven’t mentioned it since I first received the bike last week, but I have been riding the Strida quite a bit. My time playing around with that bike is coming to an end though. I’ll be traveling all next week and I plan to ship the bike back before I leave. If I don’t get a chance to post about it while I am on the road, I will do so after I return. In the mean time, check out a few pictures of the bike that I posted on Flickr.

I mentioned in the earlier post that my four year old really liked the Strida when he first saw it. When I got home from work yesterday, he showed me this picture that he drew of me with the “little triangle bike". He told me that he drew it to show his friends at preschool how cool it is (he uses the word “cool” all the time; can’t imagine where he picked that up). One thing I can definitely say about the Strida is that it does attract a lot of attention, around here anyway. I ride all kinds of different bikes around Greenville, but none of them seem to turn heads like this little folder.

I also want to pass along a link to some renderings and photos of an interesting Cargo bike concept. I like the design and I am definitely a fan of the Nuvinci hub, so I am interested to see if this gets into production. Thanks to Fritz for the tip.

Speaking of bikes and cargo, watch this film that a reader, John, sent to me. Amazing; I love it.

Lastly, I want to mention something that is a little off topic, the People’s 50 Million Lottery Giveaway in the UK. If you are reading this from the UK, go to the site and vote for the Sustrans cycling campaign. Even if you don’t live in the UK, like me, the site is worth checking out. You can read more about it here and here.

As I mentioned earlier, I will be gone next week. I’ll post if I can, but it is sometimes hard to find the time during a business trip.

Do bikes (old or new) have soul?

I had an idea for a post earlier today, but I ended up working through lunch and didn't have a chance to get my thoughts together. Lately, I have been way too consumed with work to think about much else. Since I am too busy/stressed/mentally drained to post any topics of my own today, I’ll point you to an excellent post that I just saw on Belgium Knee Warmers (a great blog that you should check often if you don’t already).

The BKW post got me thinking; the road bikes that interest me run the gamut from lugged steel classics to the latest sculpted and heavily engineered carbon fiber wonder bikes. To be honest though, I would much rather ride the latter these days. As nice as handcrafted lugged steel road bikes may be, the material and engineering advances in high end racing bikes in the past few years are pretty incredible. I really like sleek new lightweight bikes so those are the bikes I most often want to ride (recreationally at least). Still, I don’t really find myself feeling attached to any new bikes. I like my Specialized road bike, but I could always sell it and get something lighter, sleeker, faster, and better. Recently, I borrowed a friend’s spare Dura Ace 10 equipped Scott CR-1 for a couple of rides and I loved it. I wouldn’t think twice about trading my road bike for that one. Does that mean the Scott has more soul than my S-Works? Not really, I think it just means that the CR-1 felt light, stiff, fast and, probably most importantly, new to me.

As much as I like new bikes, the bikes that I have a strange attachment to are the ones that I have owned for years but no longer really ride that much. I don’t ride my mid 1980s Pinarello nearly as much as my other bikes and I never ride my late 80s Marinoni, but every time I consider listing one of them on ebay, I just can’t go through with it. I guess I just have a hard time letting go. Does that mean that my old lugged steel bikes have soul and my newer ones don’t? I am not sure. Most likely I just feel an attachment to those bikes that I have owned for a long time go because of the memories that I have associated with them. All the dents and scratches that detract from the market value mean something to me. Of course, I might be convinced to part with those bikes for the right price. Does anyone want to buy a couple of 80s vintage lugged steel bikes; hardly ever ridden (this decade at least)?

BikeFast tray

Thanks to Nadia of the excellent design blog Pan-Dan for pointing this out to me. I especially like the rider’s view photo that shows a partially eaten slice of bread sitting on the tray. I am not sure how long that would last on my ride to work. Perhaps the tray needs a shield in the front to keep the rider’s breakfast from blowing away. Anyway, I thought the concept was fun and it made me smile. As great as the tray idea is, I think I will continue to eat breakfast on my bike without one.

I also want to mention this Pingable post from last week. There are some really nice looking blogs on the list and I am honored that Bicycle Design was included.

My first impressions of the Strida

I briefly mentioned the Strida bike, designed by Mark Sanders, several months ago. The current version of the Strida, which was originally designed nearly twenty years ago and has only recently become available in the United States, was picked as one of the top 3 bikes at the Taipei Cycle show earlier this year (incidentally, another of Sanders’ bikes, the Swivel-head, was also in the top three). Areaware, the company that just recently started distributing the bikes in the U.S., sent me a Strida 5.0 to try out for a week or so, so you can expect a full review later.

I received my Strida yesterday, so I was anxious to get it out and take it for a spin last night. As you can see from the photograph, the riding position is drastically different than that of the bikes that I usually ride, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. As it turns out, the Strida was a lot of fun to ride and the riding position didn’t feel as cramped as I expected. I am 6’ 2”, so I was a little concerned about the close proximity of the seat to the handlebars (like an old highwheeler). I don’t think I would want to ride 50 miles on the Strata, but that is not what the bike is for. For a short urban commute, especially one that includes a partial ride on public transit, a bike like the Strida would be great.

I was very curious about the belt drive so I immediately put it to the test by riding as fast as I could up a short, but very steep, grade near my house. The bike is not exactly designed for steep climbing (as mentioned before, that is not really the intent of an urban folding commuter), but it still did pretty well. The belt performed flawlessly with no slipping under the increased load of a few fast uphill sprints. I won’t be taking the Strida on my next group ride over Paris Mountain, but I did enjoy my first short ride on it, hills and all.

When I got home, I played around with the bike a bit. It really is fun to fold and unfold and some of the design details are very well thought out. In the folded position, the bike is still pretty long, so I am not sure it would work well as a travel bike to take on an airplane. It does, however, fold very quickly and has a very small footprint when upright, so wheeling it onto a subway car or bus would not be a problem. I’ll comment more on the features that I like and don’t like after I’ve had some time to use the bike. For now, I just wanted to quickly share my first impressions. Speaking of first impressions, after I opened the box and assembled the bike (basically just unfolding it and installing the seat) my four year old commented that the “little triangle bike” was the coolest thing he had ever seen. That is pretty high praise; we will see if it can live up to that in a week or so.

Oh yeah, one last thing. I probably won’t get a chance to post again before Thursday, so I want to wish all of my U.S. readers a happy Thanksgiving. Make sure that you all get in a nice long ride after stuffing yourself with turkey.

I'm back

Well, I am back home and still getting adjusted to the 13-hour time difference. Even though I checked my work email frequently on the trip, small daily tasks seem to have really piled up while I was away. I will be in catch up mode during this short Thanksgiving workweek, so it may be a while before I can respond to any messages sent to my Gmail account. I’ll get caught up eventually, but expect me to be a bit slow to respond to any email related to the blog for a while.

I didn’t get a chance this time to take as many bicycle pictures as I have on previous trips to China, but I did take a few bike shots that are worth checking out. In addition to the three here, I have uploaded several of my pictures from the trip to a new Flickr set. I would love to elaborate on the pictures and on some of the things that I saw during the last couple weeks, but I’ll have to save that for a future post. For now, I just need to get back to work. That is the thing about traveling; the first day back in the office is always rough.

Just checking in

As expected, it has been a busy trip so far. I have been working long hours without any free time to get out and look around, so the only pictures that I have taken are from a moving van. Both of these shots were taken yesterday in a rural area just north of Dongguan. Cargo trikes like these are pretty common in China and you see them carrying all kinds of loads. I saw one a couple days ago that was heavily loaded with pigs, but I couldn’t get a shot as it passed in the other direction. Hopefully, I will get some better bike pictures over the course of the next week and will be able to share those when I return.

I also want to pass along a link that someone sent me. The crazy bicycles site gets updated with new pictures and you can vote on the coolest design. Some of the designs are crazy as the site name indicates, but it is worth a look.

Anyway, I have to run. It is 5:30 am Saturday morning and I have another fully scheduled day, but I’ll try and get some shots of the Chinese brand small-wheeled city bikes that I have been seeing in the urban areas. Hope you don’t mind blurry images through a dirty van window.

More bikes in design magazines

Bikes in design mags; that seems to be a reoccurring theme here on Bicycle Design. This week I received my copies of ID Magazine, Innovation, and the DWR Holiday 2007 booklet. Not surprisingly, all of them had bike content.

In ID’s “New and Notable ’07" issue, they featured the Trek Lime and the Jorg & Olif Oma and Opa bikes. Also, it is worth noting, ID is giving away select products from the issue include a Lime in week 2 of the contest. Read more about it here.

Innovation included the Key bicycle rack and the Cascuz commuter helmet in its 2007 Yearbook of Design Excellence. Elsewhere in the issue was an article about past IDEA winners, which mentioned the Ribbon Rack. That design has no doubt been a commercial success (you see them everywhere), but I am not a big fan of it. In most cases, people lock their bikes sideways against the rack just like they would with an inverted-U design. Though pictures of the rack show several bikes placed in the individual spaces that are formed by the shape, that does not seem to be a practical way to really use it. Two points of contact are required for a bike to be stable against a rack, so most of the Ribbon Racks in existence end up being used just like extended inverted-U racks (not an efficient use of space).

The DWR Gifts Booklet this year features two bicycles. You can order the Biomega AMS or the Electrobike Pi. The latter sells for a whopping 8 grand, making it a pretty expensive Christmas gift by my standards. By the way, if any of you out there are considering buying me an $8,000 bike this year (and I know that is what you were all thinking), I should let you know that the Pi wouldn’t be my first choice.

Metropolis had an online article about the Shimano Coasting equipped Giant Suede DX. They point out some of the bike’s features like the 2 laptop-sized panniers and the front cell phone bag with an integrated light. Read about more features that the bike’s designer pointed out in the article.

Lastly, I want to mention that Bicycle Design will probably not be updated for the next couple of weeks. I will be traveling in China and my access to the web will be limited (my access to Blogger will be even more limited if at all). I will post if I can, but I might not be able to until I return. In the mean time, if you are itching for new content, check out some of the great blogs that I have listed in the sidebar.