Yesterday, I mentioned Specialites TA founder Georges Navette's attempts to make a front wheel-drive (Traction Avant) bicycle. They failed, but he succeeded in creating a crankset with chainrings of widely varying sizes.
What if he had continued in his quest for alternative ways of powering a bicycle?
Specialites TA is known for making high-quality cranks, chainrings, bottle cages and other bike parts and accessories.
Most people refer to the company simply as "TA," without any notion as to what it signifies.* It never would occur to most people that "TA" is an acronym for "Traction Avant", or front drive.
Specialites TA founder Georges Navet was, like Tullio Campagnolo, a craftsman with an imagination--what we might call a "tinkerer." Navet, a joiner/carpenter, was fascinated by a then-new Citroen innovation: the front-wheel drive automobile. Why can't we have a bicycle like that?, he wondered.
Now, if you want to be technical (pun intended), front wheel drive bicycles were not new: Before the invention of the chain-and-sprocket drive, bicycles were propelled by crams and pedals attached to the front wheel. That is why front wheels of 1880s high-wheel (“penny farthing”) bikes were usually much larger than rear ones. Navet, however, wanted to create a front-wheel drive bike on which the gear didn't depend on the size of the wheel.
Sadly for him, none of his traction avant experiments worked. But in the meantime, derailleurs gained popularity and were finally approved for use in competition. The real potential, he saw, was in cranksets with multiple chainrings--in aluminum alloy, for light weight--in a wide range of sizes. A triple crankset greatly expanded the gear range offered by freewheels of the time (just after WWII), which had three or four sprockets ranging in size from 14 to 24 teeth.
(Now you know why those old derailleurs from Campagnolo, Huret and Simplex could wrap up yards and yards, or meters and meters, of chain even if they couldn't handle more than a 24 or 26 tooth rear sprocket: They were designed to accommodate the gearing available at the time.)
So, in a sense, even though he couldn't realize his vision of a front wheel drive bicycle, Georges Navet achieved another kind of traction avant with his cranksets and chainrings.
*--When I was growing up in Brooklyn, some of the subway cars bore TA logos, for Transit Authority. In the academic world, a “TA” is a teaching assistant: usually, a grad student who does the work senior tenured profs don’t want to do. To this day, I associate TA with trains and schools as well as bikes!
A city wants fewer cyclists to use a bike lane.
Yes, you read that right. Oh, but it gets better: that city is in what is often seen as one of the world's most bike-friendly nations.
That country is the Netherlands. The city in question in Utrecht; the bike lane, alongside Vredenburg, is said to be the busiest in the nation. It was widened a few years ago; even so, it's not enough to meet the demand.
So many cyclists ride it because Vredenberg path is the main east-west corridor the city center. As in many older cities, there simply aren't many options available: Other streets dead-end at rivers, canals, railroad tracks or other natural or artificial barriers. (This is also true in some older areas of cities like New York and Boston.) In some places, it isn't possible to build bridges or other ways to navigate those obstacles--and, in some of the more historic and scenic areas of a city like Utrecht, it's too expensive or people understandably don't want to do such a thing.
Also, as the author of the Bicycle Dutch post points out, just as "we all know that more asphalt isn't the answer to too many cars," it's "probably also not the answer to too much cycling." In other words, old European cities like Utrecht have very limited amounts of space on which to build anything, so adding more pavement would defeat one of the purposes of encouraging people to ride: reducing congestion. The city is thus looking at other possible solutions, which including the closure of some streets to motor traffic and turning them into bike routes. Another suggestion includes using a former railway bridge as a crossing for cyclists.
At least it seems that the city is trying to create a comprehensive plan to make movement from place to another safe, convenient and sustainable. Too often, American cities build bike lanes or other transit facilities without a coherent scheme. That, I think, is why too many bike lanes are poorly constructed and maintained and don't offer useful routes, or even connections to other forms of transportation.
