The Growing Bike Culture Around The World
You know bike culture is growing continuously regardless of if slowly when you start seeing more and more recumbent bicycles on the roads of a place like NY City, previously 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, with the frame geometries completely unique to that situation, make for better aerodynamics and quicker speeds so fast, in reality the land record for speed in a human-powered vehicle is held by a recumbent bicycle.
So fast, actually that early on bicycle races banned recumbent due to the design’s inherent benefits. After winning a few races, it became quite clear that, all else being more or less equal, a recumbent rider was sure to victory each time. And so the recumbent quickly faded from popular view and has been banished to generally home-built designs.
But biking is quite the rage in Europe, particularly the more socially progressive nations like Germany and the Netherlands. In Germany, there is even a town which voted to ban all automobile traffic to the edges of the town, while in Holland there are plenty of more bicycles than autos on the road on any specific 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 rough place like New York.
Recumbents, or bents for short, can be found in one or two different designs, from low-riders that look just about as if the person is laying down supine to choppers that almost look like classic motorcycle designs. In fact , ‘bents’ are a whole lot more varied than regular bicycles ( also known as uprights ) are, which is 1 reason why they aren’t yet as widely supported by bike shops in the United States.