I’ve just returned back from my first trip to the Netherlands with the CELLO for the Fietsvakantiebeurs, a two day cycle touring specific show. It was very inspiring to see such enthusiasm for cycle touring and traveling products and the CELLO was very well received.
While in the Netherlands, I had a chance to explore both by foot and on bike. I was amazing to experience how cycling is integrated into everyday life there. It all begins with an incredible infrastructure of bike paths that go down nearly every street with their own traffic lights. There are excellent facilities for bike parking and bike rentals. Excellent bike maps are available to guide you through the city and countryside. The majority of bikes are rugged hub geared city bikes, nothing fancy but long-lasting easy to ride bikes for getting around the city. Everyone rides bikes as well from business men, to moms with 2-3 kids on board to school children. From an American perspective it was quite enlightening to see and anyone involved with developing cycling infrastructure in the US needs to take a trip.
Wandertec’s European delegate, Mike the Bike, recently turned me on to Bike Radio. This weekly broadcast from the UK covers a variety of topics surrounding cycling mostly in the vein of using bikes as transport. It is a great show and truly inspiring thing to listen to as I spend my days doing what I can in my small corner to make movements forward. So far I’ve been entertained and inspired by shows on winter cycling and the UK bike messenger lifestyle. Have a look at the Bike Radio archives at http://www.unstablesound.net/bike.html.
I’ve started work on further streamlining the production of the CELLO as we look towards the spring, the cycle travel season, and an increase in orders. The key to improved production efficiency is reducing the part counts with simpler yet improved designs. It is actually quite amazing how the simpler the parts designs of a product become the better they often function. This is an everlasting and undying principal in the bicycle, the simplest of transportation devises that thrives much in part through its combination of simplicity and precision.
