Fwd: Strida musings

Here is an article which I forwarded from The Folding Cyclist Website:
foldingcyclist.com/index.html

Strida musings

A few readers have alerted me to the rather disparaging article about the Strida on the Wired Magazine blog with its fairly humorous video. As I have written before, I’ve never been a big fan of the Strida. I rode one of the early models and have briefly ridden the new Strida 5.0. I think its a reasonable bike for multi-modal transportation where you need a compact, lightweight folder for a shortish ride to and from the bus or train. Other than that, in my opinion, the bike is too limited in terms of gearing and ride quality to be used in a more general fashion. Its also a bit on the pricey side at $800. As for styling, its really not my cup of tea and I have always taken exception to it being called “revolutionary” or as Strida’s marketing pitch puts it “the first completely new bicycle geometry in 95 years”. Well, here is a bit of a history lesson. In 1919, Charles Haskell Clark filed a patent (granted in 1921) for a portable bicycle that was easy to carry onto trains or street cars. Below left is a photo of Mr. Clark from the December 1919 issue of Scientific American with his “city bicycle” and below right is his patent drawing. There are very few advances that are truly revolutionary in the bicycle world, most are evolutionary.