111–120 of 134 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Or throw out the UCI rules and build a fast, comfortable bike for customers who don't care about competing in sanctioned races. Recumbents are exactly that, but it's still very much a niche market. Furthermore, at any given component grade, a recumbent will cost more - and add a further premium if it's a trike.
Recumbents have terrible visibility (can't see over cars), suck for really steep climbs and sprinting, and are kind of unsafe for fast group rides with multiple cyclists packed close together.
Just imagine recumbent cyclocross, that mental picture is all you need for understanding why recumbents are a niche. Most real life transportation use of bicycles is full of lesser versions of similar challenges.
Is it just me, or are there seemingly far more people trying to invest and profit off bikeshares than there are using them? I've lived in several cities in europe and i'm not actually sure i've ever seen anybody using them. Yet there seems to be tons of competing companies putting out bikes in the street. On top of that, they don't even seem to bother marketing or anything. The first I'll hear of a new company is see…
Honestly, I hate the litter these dockless sharing companies have spread across the city.
It's a shame that there's been little innovation from road bike manufacturers in the past 10 years or so. The last major innovation was aero carbon frames. Since then everyone is just copying each other and trying to improve by fractions of a percent for weight, stiffness, and efficiency. Most of the value and innovation has shifted to the groupset suppliers, with Shimano taking the lion's share of the market and a f…
Every competitive road bike manufacturer is also offering a TT and/or tri model. Those are still governed by rules, but those rules allow far more radical designs. Cyclists looking for something faster than road UCI (but not quite a recumbent or velomobile) know where to get it, that market is not constrained by lack of options.
The article challenges Kickstarter to refund their 5% commission when companies go bankrupt. Seems like the right thing to do and could win back more customer loyalty.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seattle collects data on bike share usage, available here: https://www.seattle.gov/transportation/projects-and-programs... Seems in the sunnier months they get about 200,000 trips, from a fleet of 10,000 bikes. I think a lot of people start riding the share bikes before deciding to purchase a bike themselves too. Overall ridership is up 12% this year.
In Montreal, the figure ranges from 600,000 (May) to 900,000 trips (July) from a fleet of 7,500 (there are no bikes from mid-November to mid-April). They're everywhere. Edit: I was still on the 2017 figures for some reason. 800,000 trips last May, 975,000 last August. ( https://montreal.bixi.com/en/open-data )
In other words, not really a profitable market.
Oh man, I remember when SpeedX first came out. I can't describe it exactly, but it was an immediate red flag for me. Basically they tried to fix everything about buying a bike in one fell swoop and said it was going to cost less than other providers. If they were able to provide a superior experience to bike sizing, bike computer, wheels, frame, etc all in one fell swoop, then I would expect the overall product to be…
The universal playbook of all bike related crowdfunding campaigns: take a tiny innovation (or none at all, it's not strictly necessary to have something original), put it in a blender with everything that has become state of the art within the last decade or two and use it to impress those who have never experienced anything better than a walmart clunker from the falling edge of the original mountain-bike wave.
Is it just me, or are there seemingly far more people trying to invest and profit off bikeshares than there are using them? I've lived in several cities in europe and i'm not actually sure i've ever seen anybody using them. Yet there seems to be tons of competing companies putting out bikes in the street. On top of that, they don't even seem to bother marketing or anything. The first I'll hear of a new company is see…
It costs €30 for a "season", and that gives you 30-minutes free ride from the bicycles you'll find all over the place in their stands. You can pay a small fee to get more time, or you can do what most people do which is to ride to a stand, and swap your bike for another.
The only problem with the scheme is that it only runs around the summer, but I guess fewer people are interested in cycling in the snow/ice-heavy part of the year.
More details here:
This feels very typical of a Chinese "startup." Any company marketing its leadership on being some "whiz kids" is a red flag. A gigantic amount of Chinese entrepreneurship is just about people trying to game the insane capital market in China under every pretext possible, without any genuine concern for the business being sound. Not much different from what you see in the US, except for even less curbs on outright fr…
You seem to have skipped the paragraph with the little tanks. Arbitrary plot twist it out of a clear blue sky, would be too absurd even for an episode of South Park.