There’s always been something rurally romantic about tandems. You rocket off in to the sun starring at the backend of that someone special, with a baguette in your pocket and a bottle of vino in your bag. In the city, however, they seem to lose the love and appear slightly ridiculous. Designer Elad Barouch of My Atomic Mass has come up with a new type of tandem, dubbed rather appropriately the Bi-Cycle. Instead of both riders looking the same way, they face back to back, and there are opposing handlebars at each end. Obviously, this isn’t a two-wheeled apparatus intended for Toronto’s mean streets, but designed as a couple counseling technique, in which the pair are meant to establish trust and communication in order to move forward in their relationship. It’s like being asked to ride a goat backwards and all I can imagine is the couple screaming “I hate you”, before they fall off and have the scars to remind them of those happy times. You can watch two poor devils having a go at repairing their relationship here.
Montreal-based designer Christophe Robillard has come up with a delicious looking fixed gear, named The Victor. A concept piece that was designed for a project called Recadrer le vlo (Reframe the Bicycle), it started with this question: “If the bicycle is the standard bearer for sustainable transportation, shouldn’t the object itself communicate the same message?” Robillard’s design focused on reducing weight, material cost, and optimizing the manufacturing process, while using recyclable and recycled materials, and simplifying the disassembling and the separation of those elements at the end of its life. The Victor features a beautiful bent tubular frame that seems to curve around the other components, most notably, the back wheel. Blending vintage bike appeal with tasteful and smart modernity, it comes with a chain guard and a front wheel brake plus reflectors on the back fender and front tube. “When we observe the evolution of the bicycle in the past,” says Robillard, “ it’s easy to see that sustainable development was never a priority. The major bike makers focused on performance, weight and the new economic market.” Yes, yes, Monsieur Robillard, just get the damn thing made so we can all have one!
There are plenty of times I wish I could have taken my bike with me on the plane. But I’ve never been terribly excited by fold-away bikes with wheels the diameter of a toddler’s tricycle. So it’s never happened. The Urban Bicycle by Victor M. Aleman solves all that by packing down to the size of a small suitcase. The design is centers around the wheels, which have six modules, each with a double pivot joint. The spokes rotate to the center of the mechanism where it is attached to the center of the wheel, while the double triangular frame is made of expandable modules, each collapsing to a smaller dimension. Arrive at your destination, take two hours to understand the instructions, then unfold, secure, and off you peddle. Just make sure all of the many joints are properly in place. A folding-bike accident sounds awfully nasty.
