Cornfield

My wife and I each have a Terra Trike EVO. I encounter her everyday.

Pantah

When I started riding recumbents as a teenager with my parents 20 years ago, there was hardly any on the road and chances are, we knew them, both 2 and 3 wheeled recumbents. Same story when we'd go out to Sacramento once a month to ride with the recumbent group out there. One of us in the family would be on the trike and there was sometimes 1 or 2 others in the group on trikes, the rest were all 2 wheeled recumbents.

These days, I see about the same number of trikes as I do 2 wheeled recumbents where I live (Sonoma County California) which is at least once a week with 4 regulars I know of far as the trikes go. There's a good rail trail network out here and the recumbent riders (myself included) really like it.
Definitely more trike options these days. All that was available 20 years ago was generally pretty expensive so definitely a contributing factor. Took my dad a while to find the early 2000's Greenspeed GTO we still have and he wound up flying his Cessna I think down to somewhere in SoCal to pick it up, must have been around 2004. Recumbent dealers still aren't all that common but there's more available used than there ever have been before so it's cheaper and easier to find somewhat locally.

BlazingPedals

yeah, most trike riders confine their activities to MUPs; so I don't see many of them. I rarely ride on MUPs. I did see a couple of them on DALMAC this year, although fewer than usual.

Cornfield

I had to look up MUP = Multiple Use Trails

VegasTriker

If you live in a large town with many choices of where to ride it may depend on which part of town you ride in. Up until yesterday I would have said no encounters in the past two or three years but yesterday I saw 4 trikes in a row within 2 miles of my home. It's probably a group from Henderson, a town in the eastern part of the valley. They mostly ride in that area so though I knew about them I hadn't come across them in a long time. I usually ride north/south in my own area so would not have seen them but for the fact that I was on my way to do some food shopping so saw them as I drove past in my car.

Maelochs

Here is an alternative take .... three feet allows me to swerve if I suddenly see an obstruction on the roadside. If I have three feet I can avid most debris and the passing car. Given that the standard lane around here is supposed to be 11-14 feet wide, and most cars 5-6 feet wide, three feet for a bike is not unreasonable.

As for fat passing ... I say, the faster the better. The quicker the car is past me, the less chance it will hit me. If I am doing 16 and the car is doing 19, we are side-by-side for a while ... which means that I am strictly limited in my avoidance room in case of debris or bad pavement, and which means that the driver has more time to get distracted, drop his/her cigarette, sneeze, turn to yell at a kid, get scared by oncoming traffic in the other lane ...

If I am going downhill on a long straight road at 25 mph ... no cars should pass me, no matter how much room there is?

If I get hit from behind at 19 I am probably going to get really hurt ... but if I don't get hit at all .... if a driver cannot overtake another road user without slowing or swerving and colliding, that driver shouldn't be driving. I see no reason why a driver cannot just ... drive right by me at traffic speed. I am another vehicle on the road, and most drivers seem to not drive into every other vehicle they overtake?

I sincerely Hate people who creep by. They are putting me in more danger for much longer ... and what is worse, all the drivers behind them get impatient and then try to speed past even faster ... the guy six cars back cannot see me but he is getting aggravated because he has to slow form 50 to 15 ..... so he floors it and doesn't even look for a bike ... he is too busy cursing.

More than five decades of riding in traffic have shown me that it is safest for bikes to impede cars as little as possible, and to deliberately impede them when that is the safest course of action. If I don't take the lane, the lane is open for cars and the drivers in those cars should just drive.

Not saying I am right, just saying this is what I think after putting my ideas into practice for many, many years and miles. My ideas might not work, but they haven't killed me yet.

FREEBIRD1

I see them mainly on the trails, Me and my wife have tadpoles and really like them. I am however seeing a lot of e-tadpole trikes, almost an 80 to 20 ratio to standard trikes.

honcho

We ride our upright half-recumbent two-wheeled tandem regularly on the Washington and Old Dominion bike path between Arlington and Leesburg Virginia. It's a rare ride when we don't see two or three trikes on the trail. Maybe they're always the same two or three people. Nowadays, we see more trikes than two-wheeled recumbents. My unscientific survey says that the vast majority of trike riders we see are over the age of 50 and most trikes are electrified. I'm less confident in my statement about most trikes being electric assist since I don't get a good look at the rear to notice a hub motor or battery pack when passing going opposite directions. I have a trike but rarely ride it because I don't like riding it on the street to get to the trail. Also, I don't think I've ever encountered a delta style trike (excluding cruiser trikes at the beach) on our local rides.

BlazingPedals

Close. Multi-Use Paths. We often like to think of them as bike paths, but the reality is, pedestrians probably outnumber bikes on them.

squishy654

In Sacramento, pretty often actually because we have two exclusive tadpole shops and good trails.

Pantah

The paths out there are great, plus the city is just generally easy to get around in on a bike. If I didn't hate how flat it is or the terrible summer weather, I'd probably be living there.

Kelly I

Riding around The Loop (~131 miles of paved trails) in Tucson, I see easily ten trikes a day. I would guess 95% are E bikes. The local recumbent shop is Ajo Bikes, they install Bafang units. I make a little game of counting two and three wheel recumbents when riding the loop. A recent day in October, I saw six, two wheeled recumbents - a record! They were all single riders. The same day I saw 15 trikes, with 8 of those being in one group. There is a fun, social group of Tucson bent riders on Facebook - Tucson Recumbent Cyclists. Lunch/food is typically part of the ride with that group. I enjoy

rydabent

While these days most of my trike riding is on the MUPs as you say, I do like to ride suburban streets. There are two sections of suburban streets I like to ride. One is the 100 year old section of town with huge homes that are all different, and I like to see there architecture The other is a couple of developments that have huge new million dollar homes.

Limpid Lizard

My wife and I have the only two I’ve ever seen where we live, but it’s a small town of about 4,000 people and we’ve only had them nearly a week. We actually live in a community on the edge of the town and we have no animal
control so there are dogs running loose everywhere to deal with. We usually just ride into town where the dogs are kept contained and ride around the residential areas. Get lots of smiles and thumbs up 😀.

Cornfield

We get a lot of questions from adults when we ride but I love the smiles on faces of children when they see that we are riding what looks like Big Wheels or Green Machines.

mobilemail

I live in a small rural town and ride my trike on the local roads quite frequently during the warm months. I have never seen another trike. If I travel to the trail system about an hour away I will see a trike on just about every visit.

rydabent

In the recumbent world, trikes are starting to take over. As they become more popular, they are their own best advertisement, because anyone can ride one. And their big feature is that they can be ridden any speed you want to.