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Comment by riffraff | Hacker News Reader

It's a recumbent trike, this sort of design seems to still exist today, so presumably it works somehow.

https://www.rad-innovations.com/blog-our-news/about-recumben...

Just because they're niche popular doesn't mean they're a good idea. That said the position of the people on those trikes doesn't look nearly as bad as the C5.

I have occasionally seen continental European tourists on those in Ireland. They struck me as a really bad idea for another reason. They're very low to the ground, which is probably good for aerodynamics but terrible for visibility for people in trucks, busses etc. There's no way I would cycle one on any normal road.

Some people do have a small flag sticking up but I don't think that's enough.

Bad infrastructure doesn't make the bikes bad. People ride these just fine in the Netherlands, even if they're not that common.

Just like with bicycles, they can be made much more visible. I've seen recumbents that are much more visible than your average bicycle.

The proliferation and arms race of increasingly huge vehicles with poor visibility hasn't taken hold in Europe yet, but I'm not so sure that will be the case in 5 or 10 years.

We have our fair share of Range Rovers and other SUV shaped things but the bonnet heights are still not that far above average adult waist height.

Vehicles like Ford/RAM/GMC trucks with hood heights at or above eye level of an average adult just aren't a common sight at all.

Buses and trucks often have better visibility than those as they have a shorter distance between driver and the front of the vehicle. There are still huge blind spots though.

Most European countries have a much greater affinity and acceptance of cyclists than my experience of the US.

Cycling has its risks but it's far less dangerous than being sedentary. The UK has around 24 cyclist deaths per year per billion miles traveled. The US figure is about 4 times as high as the UK per distance traveled.

In the UK it's more dangerous to be a pedestrian (27 pedestrian deaths per year per billion miles traveled) yet people fixate on cycling being inherently dangerous whilst pedestrian deaths are just kind of an accepted consequence of cars driving right next to where pedestrians walk.

I always thought that a lot of the riders on these had back issues or something else that would make a long ride on a normal bicycle painful or hard to do.

Recumbent bikes/trikes and C5s have a common (very serious in my view) safety flaw which is they have a very low visual profile at the eye level of most drivers, which makes them (I think) really hazardous in dense city traffic. The first thing your average West London driver taking their kids to/from school, ballet classes, drama club etc would see of a recumbent bike of any kind is when they had already gone under the wheels of their gigantic Chelsea tractor.

I don’t think I’ve even seen a recumbent cyclist in real life without a high red or neon yellow flag on the back of the bike, presumably for exactly this reason.

The thing about those flags is they don’t address the problem of inattentive blindness. Drivers don’t expect to see something taht shape so don’t see them - flag or no flag. Secondly the flag doesn’t help with visibility where it really matters which is when the bike is really close to the vehicle on either side.

There's a subtle difference. The vehicles in your picture have moved the controls closer to the operator's hips; a little bit rearward, upward, and outward. This is probably a much more comfortable experience, especially for people whose arms are short relative to their torso length.

The wrist position is also rotated 90 degrees which looks a lot more comfortable with arms at sides IMHO.

Quite common to spot them in Germany or Netherlands.

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