Well, although bikes have been scared off the streets a lot by scooters and cars, there are some die hards. Yeah! Also, around university campuses and nearby, you can find pockets of resistance. (This is helped by the fact that the scooters are banned from the campus.) I was talking about this with two physicists, Chong-Sun Chu (who, it turned out, was visiting from Durham) and Pei-Ming Ho (of National Taiwan University), as we walked along somewhere on the NTU campus (poor guys must have been so bored by me going on about it) and I expressed my hope that I might see more folding bikes here than, say, in Los Angeles.
This expectation was based on my belief/hope that things here might more open regards the variety of things you can do with bikes to make them useful for everyday life. They both said that they’d never noticed any, and that they were not common at all. Pei-Ming conjectured (quite reasonably) that maybe they are too expensive here. So I expressed my sadness at this and made the point that if there was enough demand, the price need not be any higher than for a regular bike, and that now the city has a subway system, folders would be just perfect for getting around and some people could stop using scooters so much….blah blah blah….
Anyway, not easily discouraged, the next morning I decided that on my way to breakfast I would keep an eye out for them, and see how many I could see. I would not go out of my way, but just see what I could see while I hunted for some tasty noodles with dumplings down a side street somewhere….(as one does).
I saw 11 of them! In about half an hour, I think. Most of them were parked, but that’s ok. I took pictures of all of them as I went. People must have thought I was a nut. (Yeah, I know what you’re thinking….) In fact, over my time in Taipei and Hsinchu, I saw many. In fact, I saw a model from most folding bike manufacturers I’d heard of. No sign of the Brompton though…. Very sad not to see one.
Anyway, here are four:
A week later on, Pei-Ming mentioned to me that after I told him that I saw some, he started seeing them too. He’d just not thought to look out for them! Then he’d gone home and checked and found the the prices are pretty good. He’s thinking that they might useful and maybe he’ll get one….Excellent!
-cvj
January 13th, 2006 at 2:56 am
You are right, these are folding. But it seems to me from looking at the pictures that these bikes are of the old type: Opening the frame is really hard and you are not supposed to do it several times a day (but only a few times a year when you want to put your bike in the trunk to take it with you on holiday) which makes them much less usefull for the combined cycling/public transport approach than the Brompton style ones.
And yes I agree that the latter ones are far too expensive.
January 13th, 2006 at 4:59 am
Hey Clifford
I think you must have had a great deal of fun, when people were thinking you are nut. You are just an idealist. Nothing too nutty about it!
Fight for your folding bikes, I still prefer real ones … but I live in not too bike unfriendly old europe.
Helge
January 13th, 2006 at 8:58 am
Robert…. some of them are older, and probably were not folded much….. some of them were new though… and there were several Dahons, which are among the most affordable ones…. Bromptons are indeed too expensive…althought I notes that several years ago they used to subcontract out to a company in Hong Kong and so there were several models you could get in a number of Asian countries whihc were well matched to local prices of reguar bikes. I was hoping to see some of those. In fact, the one I spotted on the USC campus that time was one of them…the rider was from Hong Kong and she’d popped it into her suitcase and brought it over.
Helge:- I’m a nutty idealist! Also…note that these bikes are no less real than those awfully large ones everybody else rides….
Cheers,
-cvj
January 13th, 2006 at 10:00 am
.
Oooh, I really like that black and white retro scooter in the photo on the bottom right.
Sorry….
January 13th, 2006 at 10:22 am
Lol! That’s good!
-cvj
January 13th, 2006 at 11:26 am
Actually, you’re right…that one’s quite a cute design. I saw several cute designs like that and other rather splendid designs… I noticed that there’s a bit of a subculture of cute designs (retro and otherwise) equivalent to the sorts of car culture you get in LA, with lots of retro stylings and customizations…
-cvj
January 16th, 2006 at 8:50 pm
[...] One cold rainy** morning in Taipei I was looking for breakfast and one of my favourite places that sells a particularly delicate pork dumpling noodle dish was not open yet. The place I found at the end of my folding bike hunt. Thrown a bit by this unexpected situation, I wandered some new alleyways and found an interesting sight. There were two women with three wooden drums from which they were extracting some very tasty -looking buns, no doubt filled (as they almost always are) with some sort of delicious thing. (The drums have hot burning coals in them, which cook and keep the buns warm, and give them a delicious hint of wood-smoke to their flavour.) I bought two one beef, one chicken, and then went to this cafe I love to go to for pearl tea -that’s a milky tea with large black tapioca balls living at the bottom – deee-licious!! I took them all back to my room (along with a few other things) and they did not last long as I sat and watched the rain**. [...]
January 17th, 2006 at 2:36 pm
Hey Clifford
You made me nutty too. Take a look at: http://cow-gone-mad.blogspot.com/2006/01/im-nut.html
Cheers, Helge
January 17th, 2006 at 10:44 pm
Helge: – Excellent! One day, people will look back at this time and see that we were all insane. Then they will know that I was not a nut. Until then, I aim to convert the world, making new nuts one at a time, for as long as it takes….Welcome!
-cvj
January 17th, 2006 at 10:44 pm
P.S. I just got email from a guy I met on the bus with my bike…. he’s thought about it and wants to know where to buy one…… two nuts in a day!
-cvj
January 19th, 2006 at 1:33 am
[...] Seeing all the folders (see earlier post) rekindled my hope that all is not lost for the bike in Taiwan. You look a bit closer and they are there…just hiding. And occasionally you see a lot of fun innovations that are uncommon (at least in the USA). Three of my favourites can be seen in the following pictures. [...]