The Growing Bike Culture Around the World

Posted by Rolf Joho on July 2nd, 2010 filed in What Causes Global Warming

You know bike culture is growing continuously regardless of if slowly when you start to see more and more recumbent bicycles on the roads of a place like New York, formerly one of the most notoriously bicycle-unfriendly cities around and still host to irritable drivers and hostile policemen.

It has for a while been recognized that a reclined rider position, together with the frame geometries 100% unique to that situation, make for much better aerodynamics and much quicker speeds so fast, actually the land record for speed in a human-powered vehicle is held by a recumbent bicycle.

So fast, in reality that early on bicycle races banned recumbent because of the design’s inherent advantages . After winning a few races, it became quite clear that, all else being kind of equal, a recumbent rider was definite to triumph every time. And so the recumbent quickly faded from preferred view and has been relegated to mostly home-built designs.

But cycling is reasonably the rage in Europe, especially the more socially progressive nations like Germany and the Netherlands. In Germany, there’s even a town which voted to prohibit all vehicle traffic to the fringes of the town, while in the Netherlands there are many more bicycles than autos on the road on any given day! And so it is that in these states the recumbent bicycle has found reasonably widespread adoption, and the trend looks to be catching on even in a coarse place like New York.

Recumbents, or bents for short, are available in several different designs, from low-riders that look virtually as if the person is laying down supine to choppers that virtually look like classic motorcycle designs. Actually ‘bents’ are a heap more sundry than regular bicycles ( often referred to as uprights ) are, which is 1 explanation why they don’t seem to be yet as widely supported by bike shops in the United States.