ploughberry

I know very little about recumbent bicycles, and only see them once in a while, but I was wondering, do you get the same power in that position that you can get on a traditional bike? (I have never ridden a recumbent bike.

ChiliDog

I know the solution to your problem: get a new wife!!

tom o

Wait a minute, I know what the problem might be...are you riding naked?

he he he

phatjoe

I have gotten almost nothing but positive comments from people in the community. The one sad exception is the guy at my church (he and his family were biking to and from, as I was) who seemed vaguely irked about my Burley Canto. The pre-teen kids told me they liked my cool bike. Dad frowned and chimed in, "it's not a real bike." Sure it is, I replied with a smile, it's just configured differently from yours. "But it's not a real bike. It's something else . . . a trike or something." No, I explained, still smiling, it has two wheels, so it's a bi-cycle. He had no response to that, and his friendly wife changed the subject to bike-commuting in general.

The neighborhood guys my age think my bent is cool, and some have said they want to get one themselves. Their wives, on the other hand, refer to my bent as "that funny-looking bike." So does my mother-in-law. The neighbor girls call it the "old-man bike." I'm not young and trim, so I probably don't look very cool on it. I try not to care. I enjoy running errands on my bent, and I try to put in a 15-mile ride every day when it's above 35 degrees.

bentcruiser

Ignorance.

Glasspacker

Exactly. End of thread.

Trsnrtr

Seconded.

tom o

I was in court today and a young man had been carjacked by a hitchhiker he picked up. The guy beat him up, stole his car, then drove around getting parking tickets and running redlights.

Makes a few stupid comments look less threatening. Still irritating but less important.

bruceha_2000

There are a lot of different styles of recumbants so 'that position' is hard to answer. :-) We got my wife an EZ-1 SC Lite this past summer. Her RA made riding a regular bike uncomfortable. An EZ-3 AX Trike with a VERY slightly higher position on the pedals (compared to the EZ-1 SC) hurt her hips. The SC-1 is a bit more like a 'regular' bike than the short wheelbase (SWB) recumbants you might see that have the pedals much higher and forward of the front wheel.

I have ridden it a couple of times. It is MUCH easier on my knees, no pressure on my wrists, big comfy seat. :-) I took the kids down the bike path (20" and 24" bikes, with gears, the SC-1 has a 20" rear and 16" front). I coasted more than pedaled, out and back. The 100 PSI tires have seemingly no rolling resistance. There were a lot of times I had to brake while coasting so as to stay behind the girls. It isn't as fast up a hill as you can do standing on the pedals of a regular bike. I HAVE to stand on the pedals of my 10 speed or my knees die. On the recumbant, you have to learn not to push hard on the pedals, but turn them. It is a bizarre thing to describe, you have to try it. If you feel pressure on your knees, you aren't doing it right. :-) I think it is sometimes refered to as 'spinning'.
EZ-1 web site

Bruce

funbun

I thuoght the thread ended?

bent3wheeler

all i have recieved are positive comments about my ez3 usx.if i ever do get harassed i'll just tell them "what do you expect i got hit in the head"i have no balance.i don't care if someone thinks i look funny on my bike pulling a trailer with my dog in it.it's just a good thing my dog doesn't mind riding with 3 20 amp hour batterys.happy trails and keep dodging those squirrels!!!

Lucky13

>>In another shop across town they had a little better attitude toward bents. The mechanic/salesman was pretty knowledgeable about the two brands of recumbents they sold. However, he wanted to know what kind of injuries I had that was forcing me to consider recumbents>>

I ride a recumbent only out of necessity. Mild to moderate wrist problems forced me to abandon my DF bicycle...for fear of causing long term damage. (Too many years of grinding away on boats.)

Frankly, I consider the entire recumbent experience to be somewhat over-rated. In my case, a 'bent was, of course, a solution. But I'm not at all surprised that the *platform* still resides in the realm of a niche product.

toybox

I'm just curious about your recumbent experience, could you elaborate?

Glasspacker

"Underrated" is more appropriate. With bents you can have comfort, speed, looks, aerodynamics, torque against the seat, etc....whatever you want with a wide variety of styles. Is all this available with DFs?

Except for the fact that they are banned from most official races, price and transportation logistics likely play a part in the "niche" position it's in.

dfulton

I agree with Glasspacker, totally underrated. I just watched a video of last years "Ride the Rockies", 5 day tour around the Colorado western slope, beautiful but tough riding. They had a camera at the top of the pass on the first day, all the DF riders look miserable, the only guy smiling is riding a Rans Rocket. At the end of the 2nd day, all the DF riders are heading for the massage tent, the few bent riders are heading for dinner.

Darren

Merriwether

Recumbents are unusual in their appearance, obviously, and are unusual in the quirky-geeky direction, so they're going to attract attention. Most of it is positive. Some of it will be from obnoxious losers with limited imagination. There you are.

I don't have a recumbent anymore, but my touring bike with panniers and a cargo trailer sometimes attracts unwanted attention. If I cared what people thought, I wouldn't roll those things out in the first place.

I don't think this has anything to do with the way he was received, but someone I rode with a few years ago had a recumbent, and believed for a while he was going to pack away everyone else. The thing wasn't as much an improvement over a good road bike as he expected. He was a bit difficult to be around for a while.

Speaking for myself, I started biking for reasons other than wanting to fit in with the race-replica bike club crowd (though I ride with a club sometimes). So, I never sneered at recumbents.

I owned a couple, actually, but I went back to riding my road bike. At the price range I bought the recumbents at their advantages were primarily ergonomic, and not efficiency into the wind. So, they weren't really faster than my road bike, but they had other problems. They didn't accelerate or climb nearly as well. I couldn't hop curbs or maneuver as well as on an upright bike. They were a pain to store, carry in and out, etc. I wasn't riding them enough, so I sold them.

In general, though, I admire the recumbent design. I think the next major bike I will get will be a performance recumbent, kitted out with a fairing and the works.

All bicycles are an elegant solution to the problem of using human power for transportation. Recumbents, though, are a good solution to air resistance during open road riding. It makes sense to avoid throwing all of that energy away if one can avoid it. If the riding isn't a lot of stop and go in traffic, or offroad, or something, the advantages of that aero position are going to be great to ignore. It's fun, too, to recline and just buzz along.

Anyway, what's there to say, really? Recumbents are a different sort of bike design. Whether their riders should be banished or not is the kind of question you leave behind in adolescence, right?

ChiliDog

Well said and I third or fourth that motion to end this thread. Ride whatcha got....

cycletourist

I have noticed that recumbents seem to be involved in more bike-on-bike accicents than uprights. For example, the last time I rode in RAGBRAI (registers annual great bicycle ride across Iowa) I saw probably twenty or so bike-on-bike collisions where the riders were down. A recumbent was involved in at least half of those accidents. I have noticed the same thing in other large event rides (centuries, MS 150, etc).

A little math (based on my admittedly unscientific observations) shows why this is significant-

* of 15000 bicycles in RAGBRAI maybe 1 percent were recumbents. Maybe even less.

* A recumbent was involved in 10 of the 20 bike-on-bike crashes I saw, meaning that 5 of the 40 bicycles were recumbents. That is - 12.5% of the crashed bikes were recumbents.

* When 1% of the bikes in an event represent 12.5% of downed cyclists that is cause for discussion.

.

lowracer1

Thats funny, totally opposite from what I've seen in major events. Never see accidents with recumbents, but plenty of upright riders because they get into big pacelines and somebody f*cks up and down a bunch of them go. Maybe the recumbent riders in Iowa were drinking. This is known to be a big party ride. A heck of a lot easier to carry a 12 pack on a recumbent than an upright.

Are you sure you weren't drinking yourself and mistook mangled up uprights to be recumbents?

bentbaggerlen

WHAT? people drink on RAGBRAI?

Say it aint so......

Glasspacker

* When 1% of the bikes in an event represent 12.5% of downed cyclists that is cause for discussion.

.[/QUOTE]

So on RAGBRAI, you counted 100 DFs before you saw the next bent? You also kept track of the accidents and what type of bikes were involved, and made calculations? Wow. Do you also remember the fatality, and what bike was involved? A DF. No disrespect intended to any of the family members, but the accident would not have been fatal with a bent. Riders from my group witnessed it.

The large group that stayed at my house (happened to be along the route this year) certainly did not reflect only 1 percent bents, it was much more than that.

I will concede to you that sometimes when a bent is taking off from a crowded rest stop, he/she needs a little space, lateral-wise, to get going, but from what I've seen, the DFs just don't recognize that, which can cause a tumble sometimes. Out on the open road, I really doubt that bents are causing accidents at a rate at which you need to be concerned. They don't need to draft in a pack.

cycletourist

I never said "bents were causing accidents". I never even said that bents were dangerous. My only point was (and is) that bents are involved in accidents often enough that it made me notice and start keeping track.

I still want to own a bent (especially for event rides). But before I buy one I want to find out why they are statistically more likely to be involved in bike-on-bike accidents (at least during large events like RAGBRAI). What are the contributing factors in these accidents? Are they ridden by people who simply didn't practice starting/stopping before they took their new bent on a group ride with 15,000 other cyclists? Were they drunk? Are bents less stable at low speed? Are they more likely to veer off course while the rider fiddles with a cell phone or water bottle?

I want to know these things before I buy a bent because that knowledge will, I hope, help me avoid these accidents that I see with other bent riders.

spambait11

It's because DF riders are too darn slow and don't get out of the way fast enough! Or when they hear you coming, they always have to turn their heads to look at you, which makes them steer right into your bike space! (Helmet mirrors should be mandatory for such riders.)


Maybe for a LWB.

cycletourist

forgive my ignorance but what is DF?

Trsnrtr

A DF is a Diamond Frame but others call it an A$$-Hatchet, a Wedgie, or an Upwrong.