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OPINION

Kolelinia - you'll believe a bike can fly!

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If only. That was (and still is) my thought on seeing this proposal from Hungarian architect Martin Angelov. We're always being told by those pesky cars that we should pay our road tax and get out of their way: I, for one, will be pleased to stump up some cash if it means I can ride through the air to work on my own dedicated sky track.

"Everything started in the summer of 2008", says Angelov on his website at www.kolelinia.com. "I decided to participate in the international architectural competition Line of Site and the first crazy idea which came to my mind was to make flying bicycle-lanes, using steel wire, something like a ski lift but working on the opposite principle in which the wire is static and it doesn’t need electricity. Ultimately I sent only a pencil sketch and the idea placed for the final, which was held on February 2009 in London. My detailed presentation won the City Transportation Interchange brief.

"During the autumn of the same year I decided to develop the idea in further details, and many of the principles have been changed. This represents the third step of the development. Time only will show what will come out of it…"

There's lots of things I love about this. The main one is that it's been worked out in exacting detail, in spite of the fact that it's quite clearly mental. If they built this in Bath I'd use it every day - It's exactly what we need over the Churchill Gyratory, soaring from the Holloway to alight neatly on the station approach. I can see it in my mind's eye now: lovely. However, I can't see any developed country with a concept of litigation adopting the idea, however brilliant, at least not without some pretty serious Health & Safety hoops to jump through at each end which would probably add an hour to the commute. And you'd have to pay the safety-monkeys too, which means some kind of toll. And car drivers would complain about something. Favouritism, most likely. Or maybe the fact we don't pay 'sky tax'.

I'm particularly impressed with the bar-mounted pulley that attaches you to the guide wire, and has a rotating plate to work round the need to anchor the wire. You'd want to make sure the bolt holding your shamrock on was pretty tight, and it's not clear how you'd fit it to your drop bars, but we can work round these minor issues, I'm sure, if it means we can all ride our bikes 30ft in the air. Make it so, Bath and North East Somerset council. I'm counting on you.

Dave is a founding father of road.cc, having previously worked on Cycling Plus and What Mountain Bike magazines back in the day. He also writes about e-bikes for our sister publication ebiketips. He's won three mountain bike bog snorkelling World Championships, and races at the back of the third cats.

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7 comments

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Cozy Beehive | 14 years ago
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The architect is Bulgarian, not Hungarian.  1
You'll find a bit more interesting stuff on the sky lane in my article. http://cozybeehive.blogspot.com/2010/01/kolelinia-engineering-high-flyin...

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Simon_MacMichael replied to Cozy Beehive | 14 years ago
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Cozy Beehive wrote:

The architect is Bulgarian, not Hungarian.

Hmm. So given the peculiarities of Bulgarian body language, if you asked him if he was indeed Bulgarian he'd shake his head, and if you then asked if he was Hungarian, he'd nod  26

I think I can see where the confusion starts...  4

Thanks for pointing it out, interesting blog post too.

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Karbon Kev | 14 years ago
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How ridiculous this is, as if it's the most practical answer. Always one crackpot ....

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Ruthe | 14 years ago
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doubt this would make it out to rural shropshire ... high rope riding or playing chicken with a tractor? ... hmmm

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Kevin Steinhardt | 14 years ago
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This would *never* get approved in the UK because o' H&S, and I think I'd rather use the roads. Not a huge fan of heights; the logo looks quite pretty, though.

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dave atkinson | 14 years ago
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yeah, you'd need to have two rails, and the faster rider would be required to bunny hop from one to the other if they wanted to overtake. that'll get your heart rate up.

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Mike McBeth | 14 years ago
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Bristol to Bath would be wonderful - but what happens when we get stuck behind a slower rider? Eeek - might be accused of wheel sucking!!

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