It turns out Portland, OR, where I live, is a MAJOR bike town. It's even home to the "Initiative for Bicycle and Pedstrian Innovation." And there is indeed an astonishing amount of innovation in cycling these days, and I'm not talking about performance-enhancing pharmaceuticals. Much of it is at the high-end. Check out, for example, the supreme portability of this Co-Motion Espresso Co-Pilot, which runs at about $3,500.
Perhaps this is why Shimano got together with IDEO to ask their help with a particular business problem: while profits for the cycling industry were going up, ridership was going down. They wanted to figure out how to get more people riding again (people like me) and the output of their collaboration was a reference design for the coasting bicycle category (this is often called the cruising category). One element of their objectives was right up my alley: To tap into people's desire to reconnect with the easy, joyful feeling of riding bicycles that we remember from when we were kids. Here's the reference design (which won an IDEA Design award).
And here is my bike. It's technically not a cruiser (for instance, no pedal brakes) but it borrows from the reference design principles (Shimano is a Trek OEM.) It won't fit in a suitcase, but it wasn't $3,500 either, and I'll be all over it this summer. Brring, brring!! You can't see it, but it has a bell.
