Excerpt from TheStreet.com
NEW YORK (TheStreet) — With new bike paths chasing around lower Manhattan and the outer boroughs, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s velocipede-friendly New York puts the Big Apple within drafting range of other two-wheel world capitals, includingl Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Beijing.
Bike makers are taking notice of this ride-to-work wave.
Bike giants such as Giant, Merida Bikes International and Trek and dozens of smaller makers such as Kona, Co-Motion Cycles and BMC are quietly moving away from their pure road-racing/mountain-bike heritage. Enter so-called hybrid bikes, which bring sporty features to all-around rides a small-business owner can take to and from the office.
We’re talking serious technology: race-car-inspired internal gears, monster-bikelike disc brakes and even entirely new drive concepts. Today’s hybrid bikes use composite drive belts similar to those found in a Maserati.
“Belts are evolving into effective ways to drive a bicycle,” says Todd Sellden, director of carbon drive systems at Gates, the Denver-based advanced belt manufacturer with roughly $2 billion in worldwide sales. “Chains have been used in bicycles for 200 years. This new technology is making the bike market fun again.”
By Gates’ estimate, 150 belt-drive models from various manufactures are in the supply chain, up from 92 models last year. Retailers confirm the trend.
“Belt-drive bikes are some of the most exciting items we sell,” says Larry Wallach, manager of Sid’s Bikes, a New York bicycle shop that carries traditional and belt-drive bikes. “When I first saw one, I knew I was looking at the future.”
Belt drives have many pluses: lightness; no grease; no noise. They cannot foul clothing and will not fall off, even in serious muck. Plus, they last about three times longer than chains.
But belt-drive bikes also have issues. Tricky engineering makes professional service a must. They take some getting used to. And they cost more money — belt drives add about $300 to the sticker price.
To get a feel for the Wall Street readiness of belt-drive bicycles, I arranged for a demo of the one of coolest on the market: the Spot Brand Ajax Belt ($1,699).
I road tested this high-tech wonder from Wall Street to well, Wall Street: On a roughly 42-mile day trip from Battery Park, up Sixth Avenue to Central Park and the Bronx, down to the East River, over the 59th Street Bridge, out on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the Belt Parkway, then over the Verrazano Bridge and finally on the Staten Island Ferry back to the Big Board.
That is, I — and 30,000 or so others — rode the 5 Boro Bike Tour last weekend.
What works Belt drives are light, fast and offers gobs of control.
Within five minutes of heading up Church Street and into Sixth Avenue, I saw — or heard, rather — what the belt buzz is all about. This Spot is quiet. The single belt did not shift right or left over gear sets, as normal chain drive bikes do. Gearing, rather, is controlled by a small transmission inside the rear hub, pretty much like a car. So there was no clicking or chain clanking. Rather, the toothed, composite belt did nothing but drive the front and back gears with an eerie calm. My Ajax had eight speeds, which offered reasonable oomph for average street riding. Shifting was controlled by two simple buttons on the handlebars.
This Spot was reeeally easy to ride.
Where belt drives shine, however, is in backpedaling. That is, when you slow down and spin your cranks backward to maintain balance. Common chain drives simply fall off in this situation, and considering that I was running up against 30,000 other riders, the ability to stay upright while well nigh stopped was darn sweet.
Factor in the Spot’s hip factor and overall solid fit and finish and there was not a time over my six-hour city tour that I was not chatting with an interested fellow rider about the ins and outs of belt drives.
It was — and I was — cool.
What doesn’t work Belt drives can be complex, and they cannot yet match chains for pure efficiency.
Belt drives are an emerging technology and, like all new tools, they have rough edges. Some problems are little: Expect to learn how to change a tire a new way. Expect to get pretty darn wet from water thrown off the belt in the rain.
Some are major. The worst is that there are only eight forward gears on this particular bike. They worked great, but most serious riders are used to 10, 15 or even 20 or more chain-driven gears, which means the perfect mechanical solution for getting up and down that hill simply is not an option with belt drives. That leaves you either spinning too fast or cranking too hard on all but flat terrain. For example, getting up and over the Verrazano Bridge was no fun.
Which all means to be sure to work carefully with your bike dealer to get your belt-drive ride geared for your area. Have the wrong gearing and this bike is a $1,700 bummer.
Bottom line Belt bikes clearly have a future. In many ways they are the ultimate ride-to-work-on-Wall-Street weapon. Fast, responsive, oodles of cool. Just be sure your bike is set up the way you need it to be to work well in your town.
“Jeeves,” you’ll say, “leave the Rolls in the garage. Today, it will be the Spot Ajax Belt!”
