You know bike culture is growing steadily even though slowly when you start seeing more and more recumbent bicycles on the highways of a place like NY City, previously one of the most notoriously bicycle-unfriendly places around and still host to irritable drivers and hostile policemen.
It has always been recognized that a reclined rider position, along with the frame geometries completely unique to that situation, make for miles better aerodynamics and quicker speeds so fast, actually the land record for speed in a human-powered vehicle is held by a recumbent bicycle.
So fast, in fact , that early on bicycle races banned recumbent due to the design’s inherent advantages . After winning a few races, it became quite clear that, all else being nearly equal, a recumbent rider was definite to victory each time. And so the recumbent quickly faded from preferred view and has been banished to generally home-built designs.
But biking is quite the rage in Europe, especially the more socially progressive states like Germany and Holland. In Germany, there’s even a town which voted to prohibit all vehicle traffic to the edges of the town, while in Holland there are many more bicycles than automobiles on the road on any specific day! And so it is that in these states the recumbent bicycle has found fairly prevalent adoption, and the trend appears to be catching on even in a coarse place like NY City.
Recumbents, or bents for short, are available in one or two different designs, from low-riders that look virtually as if the individual is laying down supine to choppers that virtually resemble classic motorbike designs. Actually ‘bents’ are a whole lot more sundry than regular bicycles ( often referred to as uprights ) are, which is 1 reason why they aren’t yet as widely supported by bike shops in the United States.
Tags: bike culture, cycling, new york city, recumbent bicycles