Easy rider: reinventing the bicycle

They are faster than normal bikes, as comfortable as your favorite living room chair, consume no fuel and… are rarely seen in the streets.

Recumbent bicycles generally differ from your normal bikes by having a comfortable chair in place of the saddle and placing the pedals higher so that you can use them in the reclined position. This design holds numerous world speed records for human-powered vehicles (HPV), including a speed record of 132.47 km/h, which was achieved by Canadian cyclist Sam Whittingham last year.

Canadian Sam Whittingham has set the world speed record on a Diablo III recumbent in September 2008. Click to watch video. ​

In the lower-end price band, i.e. ones without high-tech aerodynamic fairing and titanium frames which hit thousands of dollars, recumbents still outperform upright sitting models. The reclined position of the rider greatly reduces drag, is naturally comfortable due to greater area of the seat compared to the saddle, and there is no need to put weight on your arms and wrists. No ache in your loins, no craning your head to watch the road, and no putting your lower back out after an hours-long ride.

In the case of low-racers, which have the rider sit low over the road thanks to smaller wheels, they are also safer, because if you do fall off or crash, you won’t be doing so from that great of a height.
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However ‘normal’ bikes far surpass their recumbent cousins in popularity. For one, they had a head start back in the 1930s. It was a time when bicycles were viewed as a prospect alternative to expensive automobiles and public attention to cycling events was at a high. A recumbent bicycle beat several cycling records, including the 20-year-old hour record by Oscar Egg.

Cycling officials felt Francis Faure had an unfair advantage using a recumbent Velocar.​

However, the Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) felt it was unfair, since they saw the races as competitions between riders and not constructors. Their ruling effectively banned recumbent bikes from competing (and is still in force to date), pulling the rug from underneath emerging designers.

Cycling in general and recumbent bikes in particular saw a revival in the late 1970s and 1980s after the 1973 oil crisis and fuel price hike. It was also the golden age for enthusiastic designers in Russia, as told RT veteran designer with over 30 years of experience Veniamin Ulyanovsky.

It does take a rocket scientist…
Ulyanovsky, who will celebrate his 60th birthday this year, became ‘addicted’ to inventing human-powered vehicles (HPV) when he worked at a space firm in the late 1970s.

Vladimir Kremlev for RT. Click to enlarge.

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“We used to receive updates on new patents for our work, and once I found an article about an original vehicle made by the American aviation engineer Robert Bundschuh. He invented a pedicar, a vehicle powered by the straight linear motion of pedals, and the unique mechanism was claimed to give big boosts to efficiency.”

“We had an argument, opinions split, and someone said he won’t believe it until he sees a working machine. So I decided to build one. I though it would take a week or two of my time, and ended up as a lifetime hobby,” he recalls.

A Velomobile (a four-wheeled HPV) based on Bundschuh’s design and built by Ulyanovsky was one of the first machines of its kind in the country.

“Avatar 2000” marked the resurgence of recumbents in the 1980s. Russians call the under-seat steerer in this model’s honour. Photo from http://ryanownersclub.com/​

The story is far from being original. In the US, the resurgence of recumbent bikes in 1970s was heralded by David Gordon Wilson, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his “Avatar 2000”. In Russia, most pioneers of the HPV movement had degrees in engineering and many worked in top secret workshops or research institutes.

One model in Ulyanovsky’s personal collection of home-made bikes, tricycles and velomobiles of that time was built by an engineer at an air base, where he used to ride along the runways, servicing aircraft with his toolkit safely tucked under the seat.

The only soviet recumbent to go into series “Riga-1” was an experimental product of a civil aviation factory in the Latvian capital.

Rise and fall of the pedaled dream...

To read more, see Russia Today