Hasta La Gadget!

Recently, I have been considering the ironies of combining a fixed-gear bike with a Dutch city bike, two machines from opposite ends of the cycling spectrum. It looks, though, like the king of the ready-made fixie, Bianchi, has beaten me to it. Unless I bust one out before the end of the year, that is.

You’re looking at the Pista Via Brera, a fixie that will be added to the Pista lineup in 2010. It’s a regular steel-framed Pista, with track-ends, toe clips and skinny, skinny wheels, but instead of the drop handlebars designed for racing, you’ll get a much more comfortable straight bar, complete with winter-warmer cork grips. The Via Brera will come with a SRAM Torpedo rear hub, which can be converted from fixed to freewheel at the turn of a screw. Presumably you’d want to add a brake if you choose the freewheel option.

It’s gorgeous, and clearly influenced by Dutch bike design. All it needs is a Brooks saddle and some fenders. The price is to be decided, but we’d expect it to be somewhere around the $750 asked for a regular Pista.  Available in the fall. I want one.

Product page [Bianchi USA via Prolly]

Back when I was a kid, in the middle of the 1980s BMX scene, it was all about the Mushrooms: ribbed, rubbery handlebar grips which had been so overdosed with friction at the factory that just brushing your pinky against one could give you blisters. Combined with the then-fashionable two-finger brake levers, impossibly stiff sticks which had been similarly over-endowed, this time with torque, and you had a disastrous recipe for manual trauma, with top riders ending up as shovel-handed freaks.

I didn’t care. My parents bought me a racing bike: my damn brother got the BMX. Which is why I have a writing job and he spends his days playing cricket – without a bat. Sweet irony, then, in the Aaron Ross Signature Grip from Odyssey, a BMX handgrip that features an embossed QWERTY keyboard. At least it looks like a QWERTY. Look closer and you’ll see Ross’ name spelled out on the top row, along with “Odyssey” where the numbers should be.

I love it because it’s just plain nerdy, and it might be the first ever handlebar grip I actually buy. Around $8 the pair.

Product page [Google via Art of Trackstand]

I used to laugh at “off-road” pushchairs and strollers, putting these disk-brake-equipped baby-carriers somewhere alongside the SUV on the map of urban overkill. Then a friend told me he uses his high-tech stroller to go jogging with the kids. I didn’t think he should be jogging (nobody should be jogging), but I relented on the disk-brake issue.

Here, though, is a far more civilized device, a trike with seats up front for the rugrats. If I ever enter the horrors of parenthood, I might opt for one — if only so I can poke the kids out in front to check out the more dangerous blind junctions. The aluminum Taga comes equipped with a pair of disk brakes (of course) on the front wheels and a roller brake on the back, plus a parking brake, and three speed Shimano Nexus gears.

But what about when the kids grow up? Well, the Taga will also convert into a standalone (roll-alone?) bike, as well as transforming into a more normal, bike-less stroller. These are rather pointless, we guess, and it might be better to just add a kiddie-carrying trailer to the back of a regular bike, but the folding does come in handy in other ways — it folds up so you can carry it in the car. Or more likely, the SUV. £1,700 ($2,600), Europe only (like you’d take this on US roads anyway).

Product page [Taga via Geekologie and Treehugger]

Poor cyclists. Not only do they sustain indignity every time a car parks in a bike lane, or a moronic taxi passenger flings open a door in their path, the poppets have to brave their journeys to a soundtrack of car horns and abuse shouted by other, less civilized road-goers.

Podio, a neat, handlebar-mounted MP3 player from Japan, aims to ease their pain. Here’s what it does, scooped directly from the product page, itself rendered in beautifully sonorous Japlish:

Moreover, mounted by a special bracket over a bike handlebar,Podio Audio is transformed into a bike audio, and from then on, bike hiking is not mere exercising, but also an enjoyable melodious tour.