this Oregon Manifest bike design thing pits teams from 5 cities in a competition to design the ultimate urban utility bike. On July 25 the bikes will be simultaneously revealed but separately one in each of the cities: Chicago, New York, Seattle, Portland, San Francisco. The Seattle bike will be at Axis in Pioneer Square and I plan to be there because I like bikes.
This kind of thing interests me in an oversized-glossy-coffee-table-book way. In a wine-sippy cheese-nibbly chin-strokey black-turtlenecky art gallery way. However, I really believe an Ultimate Urban Utility bike is any old fucking bike that gets ridden every fucking day in the city by a normal person. It's not some shiny pretty thing that will ultimately be purchased by Jeff Bezos to hang from the ceiling of his latest employee lounge. It's not some over analyzed specimen in a graduate school physics lab. It's not a centerfold in Cog magazine.
This kind of thing interests me because I spend my work days reconfiguring Giant Iguanas and GT Karakorams and Raleigh Techniums into urban utility bikes that sell for $253 and get ridden by actual people every day in this city.
This kind of thing interests me because I ride an urban utility bike to work every day.
In the universe of cycling I live on a planet in a utility cycling galaxy but its living conditions and constraints differ greatly from the ones that these design teams inhabit.
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