Olivier Guo

It was a bright sunny day, about three years ago, and the air was a bit chilly, as it came down from Mt. Shasta. I was driving down a one-lane road in the middle of an urban farmfield with a few bikers cruising up and down, when suddenly I felt a wave of air and a blast of cool air hit the back of the car.

I turned on the air conditioning, leaned back to get a better view of the scene, and to my great surprise the car wasn’t doing its normal coolness. My eyes went wide and my lungs screamed. I had just parked a car where my bike was parked. No matter the conditions, we’re all vulnerable in some small way or another. But what I saw next in the car’s window was absolutely appalling. I started to wonder what made it so damn hot, and that night I kept wondering if I’d have to leave my car parked out in the open, alone, for a very long time. I was on the verge of tears by the time I got back home to California.

My car was never parked out in the open. My bike was always parked outside. Not because of the weather, but because of the design of bikes, the design of our bikes, the nature of how bikes were built for the way we used them. A bike’s only purpose is to accelerate forward until you crash and roll over, to protect your backside while running. And here we are, still stuck trying to move forward in this design paradigm. Bikes are designed around that concept, built to protect you.

One thing that is becoming more common is for bikes to be parked out in the open, but this kind of open arrangement is often not the best location for bikes. It’s certainly not where you want your bike to be when it’s cold. I think that’s a really important thing to realize about bikes, for it’s only when the weather starts to start deteriorating that it’s useful to park them out in the open as the warm air blows over them.

The more I was learning about bike design, the more I came to understand that the best way to get the best conditions for you as a passenger-on-bike is to be close to you and within a few feet of your bike. This is one of the primary benefits of riding bikes – and bike designs in general – to put you close to the