8 Reasons to Love the Denny

By Mandolin Brassaw, Brangien Davis, John Levesque and Lisa Wogan December 22, 2014

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This article originally appeared in the December 2014 issue of Seattle Magazine.

he aim of making cities more bike friendly has traditionally focused on the streets—striping, signals and barriers, that sort of thing. But this year The Bike Design Project (oregonmanifest.com), a nonprofit innovation platform in Portland, took aim at the velocipedes themselves with a national competition to inspire bike designs that strive to do no less than “reshape urban mobility.”
Visionaries in Portland, New York, San Francisco and Chicago took up the challenge, but it was a Seattle partnership—of Sizemore Bicycle, a custom bike builder in Fremont, and Teague, a downtown design firm—that took the prize with a utility bike appropriately named after a hill that was named after a local pioneer.

Tricked out with features inspired by our terrain and climate, the Denny will be shepherded from prototype to product by Fuji Bikes, maybe in time for Bike to Work Day next May.

1. Instead of fenders, a minimal U-shaped bar has rubber bristles that brush water and particles off the tire.

2. Electric motor in the front hub supplements pedal power for hills

3.The 11 gears shift automatically based on the rotational speed of the front wheel

4. Turn signals

5. Head and tail lights turn on automatically in low light

6. Strips of LEDs illuminate the road around the bike making it more visible to cars

7. The square handlebar doubles as a bike lock

8. A removable battery, stored under the cargo rack, powers all the bells and whistles

DOWN THE ROAD

In October, the Seattle Department of Transportation released the latest iteration of the city’s bicycle plan, which aims to add 33 miles of protected bike lanes and 52 miles of greenways during the next five years. The announcement was greeted with questions about the funding, complaints about excluded routes (N Rainier Avenue and the Ballard Bridge), and shouts of joy for the addition of protected lanes along Dearborn Avenue, Rainier Avenue S and Roosevelt from N 45th Street to the University Bridge. Meanwhile, the two-way protected bike lane along the infamously dangerous stretch of Second Avenue between Yesler and Pine saw bike traffic triple almost immediately after it was installed in September.

FLEET STREET


If you subscribe to the notion that more bikes on the road make cycling safer for everyone—even when those numbers are inflated by pelotons of tourists moseying from the sculpture garden to Pike Place Market—then the launch in October of the Pronto Cycle Share (prontocycleshare.com) is great news. More than 500 bikes based at 50 stations from SoDo to Lake Union and Capitol Hill to the waterfront will help raise the profile of bikes on these busy streets.

 

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