aka Tom Reingold
Join Date: Jan 2009
Location: New York, NY, and High Falls, NY, USA
Posts: 40,591
Bikes: 1962 Rudge Sports, 1971 Raleigh Super Course, 1971 Raleigh Pro Track, 1974 Raleigh International, 1975 Viscount Fixie, 1982 McLean, 1996 Lemond (Ti), 2002 Burley Zydeco tandem
Mentioned: 513 Post(s)
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There is an old Centurion Ironman model with the Terry design, i.e. 24" front wheel and 700c (~27") rear wheel. A family member who is 5'0" tall has one, and it fits well.
I attended a talk that Terry gave at Bike Expo about three years ago. She's a mechanical engineer. It was really interesting. She said that the design works but not for the reasons she expected. The thinking had been that the ratio of torso to leg length is smaller with women than with men, and the small front wheel allowed the top tube to be shorter. This reduces the distance that the rider reaches forward. That's fine, but it turns out that women, in general, need to reach forward less than men do not because of short torsos but because of low body mass in the upper body. It can be too much work to hold yourself up if your shoulders and back are doing too much work.
New road bikes with 700c wheels made for women achieve a shorter reach by making the head tube angle more shallow. This allows a short top tube and prevents the front wheel from hitting the down tube. Some might argue that a shallow head angle makes a bike ride badly, but this doesn't seem to be a problem.