Michael Hutchinson is a author, journalist and former skilled bicycle owner. His Dr Hutch columns seems in each problem of Biking Weekly journal. Related to this column, ‘Hutch’, has held the title of ‘Brompton folding-bike World Champion’ 3 times.
I’ve been a fan of folding bikes for years. In a nation the place safe bike storage is nearly non-existent, and the place bike theft is seen by the police as extra of a punchline than an precise legal offence, the concept I can simply fold a motorbike up, take it into my vacation spot and stick it in a cloakroom or below a desk appears so easy and logical.
Folding bikes go on trains with out having both to guide an area or struggle off three different riders for it. With a only a few demented exceptions you’ll be able to take a folder on a bus or a tram or the Underground. You’ll be able to take it in a taxi. You’ll be able to stick it within the again seat of your helicopter. Spherical a metropolis the sensible impact is sort of a teleport.
However right here is one draw back. As quickly as anybody sees you arriving someplace, you’re labeled as “Loopy Bike Man”.
As an illustration, a few years in the past I used to be doing a contract commentary shift for a broadcaster. I used to be carrying black tie, as a result of I used to be going straight on to an awards try this night. (The place, you could have an interest to be taught, I failed by miles to win the award for “Columnist of the Yr.”)
Simply as I used to be leaving the studios, I received a textual content from an optician to say my new monocle was prepared to gather. This isn’t an affectation – I’ve a watch situation meaning monocles are fairly helpful.
Thus it was that I arrived at Specsavers to gather my monocle, carrying a dinner jacket and carrying a Brompton folder.
Hutch displaying how briskly a Brompton can go on the Blenheim palace Biking pageant, 2011
(Picture credit score: Andy Jones for Future)
Had I arrived on a “regular” bike, the employees would have seen me as an unremarkable man; a hard-working magician who felt his stage persona wasn’t irritating sufficient already, or perhaps an astronomer on his approach to a gathering of the Royal Society. As a result of I used to be on my folder, I received labeled as Very Loopy Bike Man. I wager they nonetheless discuss me…
The most recent race content material, interviews, options, evaluations and professional shopping for guides, direct to your inbox!
What rankles much more is that this type of view isn’t confined to opticians. There are altogether too many cyclists who additionally view folding bikes with one thing between scepticism and contempt. “They deal with so badly they’re harmful,” I get informed by folks whose “regular” bikes don’t have any entrance brake and carcass displaying on each tyres.
I settle for that bikes with small wheels deal with slightly in a different way from larger-wheeled bikes. It’d take, oh I don’t know, perhaps fifty metres of driving to completely adapt to it. I’ve ridden a folder up Alpe d’Huez and, maybe extra to the purpose, again down – no downside. But there are many riders who refuse to imagine that is even attainable, as if the legal guidelines of physics cease making use of as quickly as your wheels shrink.
I believe it’s the identical individuals who push previous me after I’m ready at a visitors gentle as a result of they will’t take care of being behind a Brompton. Then after I’ve overtaken them once more, they do the identical factor on the subsequent lights, and those after that. I really feel like telling them it’s in regards to the dimension of the watts not the dimensions of the wheels.
The factor that stops me doing so is the factor that reassures me after I see an optician giving me a sidelong look. I’m proper. We’re proper. We folder riders are a selected folks, even when we’ve chosen ourselves. You may need to be an uptight arse about my humorous little bike, however after I’m on my folder I can admire that that’s not your fault. That’s simply the best way you’re, you uptight arse.
And in the future you’ll see it my means. Everybody will trip a folding bike. Both that or somebody will invent a good bike lock. However that appears impossible.
This column initially appeared in Biking Weekly print journal in 2023, and was republished as a part of our April 2024 ‘commuting week‘.
