How The Most Bicycle-Unfriendly City Became Pro Cycling

You know bike culture is growing continuously even if 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, together with the frame geometries 100% unique to that situation, make for much better aerodynamics and quicker speeds so fast, in fact , 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 advantages. After winning a few races, it became quite clear that, all else being kind of equal, a recumbent rider was certain to triumph every time. And so the recumbent quickly faded from popular view and has been banished to usually home-built designs.

But cycling is reasonably the rage in Europe, particularly the more socially progressive states like Germany and Holland. In Germany, there is even a city which voted to prohibit all automobile traffic to the outskirts of the city, while in the Netherlands there are many more bicycles than cars on the road on any particular day! And so it is that in these nations the recumbent bicycle has found fairly prevalent adoption, and the trend looks to be catching on even in a coarse place like NY City.

Recumbents, or bents for short, can be found in a few different designs, from low-riders that look virtually as if the person is laying down supine to choppers that just about look like classic motorcycle designs. In reality ‘bents’ are a whole lot more sundry than regular bicycles ( also known as uprights ) are, which is 1 reason why they are not yet as widely supported by bike shops in the U. S. .

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