But that is all coming to an end because who needs bike racks when you can just simply wrap your bike around a lamp post or telephone pole? With its double function as a bike and a lock, 21 year old Kevin Scott's design aims to decrease problems with bike theft. By incorporating a ratchet system in the top and down tubes, riders simply push a lever on the seat tube to cause the bike's frame to collapse. At this point, it will be flexible enough to bend around a pole and the user can slide the handlebar into the bicycle seat, locking the two together.
Kevin Scott is currently looking for financial partners and sponsors to help fund his project, but I don't think that'll be a problem. Afterall, if this bike is put into production, it'll help save money on what would have been spent on funding more bike rack competitions and useless bike rack designs!
Although still in its developmental stage, the question remains whether or not consumers will be able to accept this new innovation or will the design fail to overpower the skepticism people may have over the safety of the rigid-flexible bike frame?
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ReplyDeleteAlthough this design is cool and interesting to think about, in my mind, it is a terrible design solution to the problem at hand. With this concept, you would then need poles to wrap bikes around. The pole design would be far less effective than the current system because you would need to stack bikes. One bike per pole is inefficient. Current poles or trees are also usually public or private property NOT designed to second as bike racks. I'm not convinced vandalism of bike racks in Toronto is a serious issue. Those things, in my experience, can take quite a pounding. I think selling people on the safety of the bike frame is the least of Kevin Scott's problem at this point. I think consumers won't go for it because it's impractical. This has been an Uncle Dave Exlcusive post response.
ReplyDeleteAgree with dave. You would still need to carry around a bike lock, mainly because there are such things as fences that this can't be wrapped around. You can even see in the picture where Kevin Scott is wrapping the bike around the pole, a fence behind him that could hold, I dunno, like 6 bikes. I would imagine that it would also be an incredibly heavy frame, unless it. . The bike rack can hold many more bikes in a smaller area than a forest of poles could. The bike rack uses far less material than the pole forest.
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