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Rans Crank Forward Bicycle

Update March 27,2022: Still loving this bike and riding it almost every day. Just learned that Rans sold off its bike business to https://phoenixbikewrx.com

For the past few years I have been commuting to work in DC by bicycle. I was using a standard, rigid frame, Mt. Bike. After a while, I developed chronic back, neck, and shoulder pain. After a few month hiatus, and a new bike, I am back to my commute of 17 miles a day on a bicycle. Three months ago, I purchased a Rans Crank Forward from Bikes@Vienna. It is a fantastic commuting bike. I recommend it highly. The reason it is called a “Crank Forward,” is because the bottom bracket (pedals) are in front of the seat instead of below the seat. It is a hybrid between a recumbent and a regular bike, combining the best of both. I bought the Cruz, which is the most relaxed model. There is no pressure on my wrists, no hunching of the shoulders, and no craning of the neck. The steering is a little squirrelly, and it takes a short while to get used to. It is a little longer than a standard bike, but I can still take it in the metro, if I need to. I’m not sure I could transport it on the bus. The racks on the front of the buses are made for standard size bikes.

Another benefit of the bike is that there is only one frame size. I am 6’2″ and my girlfriend is 5’3″ and we can both ride the same bike with just a quick seat adjustment.

WHY RIDE CRANK FORWARD BIKES?
See: http://www.crankforward.com/whyride.htm

See what they look like in action:

[Youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0sgUjhCF6U&feature=related]

A few reviews from different sources:

http://www.bentrideronline.com/index.php?op=ViewArticle&articleId=133&blogId=1

RANS Fusion

Bryan | 16 March, 2007 20:19

By BRYAN J. BALL
Managing Editor

I admit it. My name is Bryan Ball and I used to be a crank forward skeptic. I had ridden a lot of these “crank forward” semi-recumbent bikes over the last year or so and until a couple of months ago, I really did not think that much of them. I thought they were fun enough but I hadn’t been on any that were very comfortable or really made me consider choosing one over a good recumbent. Or a good upright bike for that matter. Fortunately, Randy Schlitter of RANS didn’t give up on me and kept pushing me to give one a longer run. I finally decided to take him up on his offer and he sent me a nice aqua green 2007 Fusion to review.

Since the Fusion comes from an actual recumbent bicycle manufacturer, it’s quite a bit different than many other crank forwards. The bottom bracket is a lot farther forward than many other flat footer bikes and it has a real recumbent style seat base. Fusions are also a bit more upscale than many of their counterparts and the line has pretty nice components and very nice details and options. It’s $950 price tag is a bit higher than many other flat foot style bikes but the Fusion appears to be well worth the asking price in my opinion.

…[delete]…

I intentionally took a little bit longer with this review than I usually do. From all accounts I’ve heard, the Fusion is one of the best crank forward/flat footer/semi recumbent bikes out there and I wanted to make sure I gave it fair shake. I usually put between 100 and 200 miles on a test bike but I put about 400 on the Fusion. I was definitely left with a positive impression. I’m still nowhere ready to give up any of my recumbents for one but I could see a place in my stable for one of these bikes. It’s a great for urban riding and performs better than I thought it would. If you’re looking for a fun bike for recreational or urban riding I would take a look at the Fusion line for sure.

RANS FUSION
MSRP – $950
Highs – A blast to ride, pretty light, good value
Lows – Not as fast as a fast recumbent, not as comfortable as some recumbents
More Info – http://www.ransbikes.com

Re: Crankforward

Posted by: Spanky (IP Logged)

Date: March 22, 2007 10:27PM

I have a RANS Zenetik, which in fact I reviewed in the reader’s bikes section of the last edition of VV. I’ve owned 3 recumbents and a great many uprights, and have found this bike to be quite a revelation. It really does combine the best of both worlds, and still performs very well, at least as well as a standard road bike. It is also much faster and more comfortable than my Pedersen, (but possibly not as groovy).

Right now it’s my favourite bike, with another RANS, the Stratus, as second in line to the throne. I don’t even ride standard geometry type bikes any more. The Zenetik is the most versatile bike I’ve ever owned, nimble enough for tight situations, yet comfortable enough for long days in the saddle.

I don’t know about other ‘Crank Forward’ models, but RANS’ line up has, in my view, revolutionary potential. I know I sound like an ad campaign, but really, this bike can’t be compared to things like the Giant Revive, or any other of the heavyish iterations of similar geometries.

It does appear that it might be quite a reach to the bars, but the bars themselves adjust backwards to a considerable extent, and there is also the possibility of installing a swept back type bar, like the Rivendell Albatross or Dove bars.

If you’re curious, why don’t you just give RANS a call and order a frame set, then have it built up wherever you live. That’s probably the cheapest way. I doubt you’ll be disappointed.

Cheers, John Hopkinson

georgebush

Sr. Member

Posts: 396

Making cycling enjoyable to the masses

« on: October 15, 2007, 11:41:20 AM »

If cycling were enjoyable more people would do it. I started riding at an early age and continued into my teens until I quit because the cycling world seemed to move in an unprogressive direction. I didn’t like the full-suspension approach to making cycling comfortable. Although cycling brings out the best in the body, the industry had failed in the thinking aspect. In my early twenties I walked/hitchhiked/trained/bussed accross the US after abandoning my motorcycle in New England (I didn’t have any money for gas). After the journey, I continued to live motorfree in a mountain town. Getting jobs eventually involved long distance travel for which I needed a bicycle. Riding the bike to work day in and day out had repurcussions unrelated to weather. Due to the logistics of my work and lifestyle, wearing bike shorts was difficult and I decided not to wear them. Right from the start, numbness was a huge problem. I could definately identify with a culture that shunned the bicycle, because for me the feeling was nothing short of sadomasichistic. Showing up to work with sleepynumb legs and a stiff neck, started off every workday on the unproductive side of things. Fortunately my employers tolerated my catatonic state enough to keep me around. I lasted a couple of years in this painfull routine until I stumbled accross a recumbent bike. At the point that I found recumbents I had grown one incredibly large testicle and shrank the other. The recumbent greatly increased my happiness level. The only problem I have with recumbents is the terrain limitations. Riding in the winter required that I regress back to the asshatchet. My search for the perfect bike brought me to the world of Crank Forward. Crankforward is a term created by Ransbikes owner Randy Schlitter. The crankforward gives the rider a high seat without a backrest which looks alot like a standard bike. The crankforward bike doesn’t compromise comfort either. I feel more comfortable without the backrest because the road vibration upsets my sensitive stomach. The road vibration that once travelled up the seat now gets absorbed in the muscle. I know have a bike that I can take safely on dirt road and even off-road. I have now taken back mountainbiking into my life, thumbing my nose at the bike industry by riding a fully-rigid crankforward. I still shun bike shorts and see any bike that requires them as LATOC unfriendly. Of course there are the die-hard riders who love the asshatchet and find it comfortable after ten hours in the saddle, but I find those people are few and far between. Everytime somone askes me what bike they should get I tell them to strongly consider a Crankforward. There are several models available from companies like trek, giant, electra, and Rans. I see these bikes as the future of cycling because they solve the oldest malady to industrial society; the uncomfortable bicycle.

superfund365.org

Superfund365, A Site-A-Day, is an online data visualization application with an accompanying RSS-feed and email alert system. Each day for a year, starting on September 1, 2007, Superfund365 will visit one toxic site currently active in the Superfund program run by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). We begin the journey in the New York City area and work our way across the country, ending the year in Hawaii. (We will need a beach vacation by then!) In the end, the archive will consist of 365 visualizations of some of the worst toxic sites in the U.S., roughly a quarter of the total number on the Superfund’s National Priorities List (NPL). Along the way, we will write an email update with highlights and conduct video interviews.

Content changes frequently at Superfund365 (everyday to be exact) so be sure to visit often or use the subscribe tools to have content delivered to you.

CREDITS
WHAT EXACTLY IS SUPERFUND?

Tags: environment, epa, superfund, visualization

Why I no longer work at the Department of Labor

It is far worse than you could possibly imagine. This just scratches the surface:

July 18, 2008

EDITORIAL

No Friend of the Workers

It should surprise no one, at this point, that an arm of the Bush administration charged with protecting Americans’ rights or safety is not doing its job. Even so, a government report and a Congressional hearing this week painted a disturbing picture of a Labor Department that simply is not standing up for workers.

President Bush has filled top posts across his administration with people who do not agree with the missions of their organizations. His Environmental Protection Agency has failed to protect the environment; his Justice Department has promoted injustice.

To lead the Department of Labor, Mr. Bush appointed Elaine Chao, who took office in 2001 arguing that states should be able to opt out of the federal minimum wage — a terrible idea that would drive down wages for the lowest-paid employees. For more than seven years, Ms. Chao has run a department that has tilted toward employers and failed to properly enforce labor laws.

In a report released this week, the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office took a close look at a sampling of cases handled — or, rather, mishandled — by the Wage and Hour Division of the Labor Department. It found that the division failed to adequately investigate complaints that workers were not paid the minimum wage, were denied mandatory overtime or were not paid their last paychecks.

In one case, a delivery truck driver complained that he was not being paid for overtime that he had earned. The complaint languished for more than 17 months before an investigator was assigned. Then, the case was soon closed because the statute of limitations was about to run out.

The division dropped another case, in which disabled children were allegedly being paid cash by a trucking company to operate large machinery in violation of child-labor laws, because its investigators could not locate the employer. The G.A.O. had little trouble finding a company that appears to be the one cited in the complaint.

The G.A.O.’s findings suggest that the government is not doing its job of going after employers who “cheat their employees out of their hard-earned wages,” said Representative George Miller, the California Democrat who chairs the committee that held this week’s hearing.

The Labor Department responded, as The Times’s Steven Greenhouse reported, that the “Wage and Hour Division is delivering pay for workers, not a payday for trial lawyers.” The department has it exactly backward. By failing to enforce the law, it is creating more work for trial lawyers, who can turn what should be simple administrative procedures into full-blown lawsuits.

Attacking trial lawyers is a classic Republican talking point. Its use in response to complaints from hard-working Americans that they are being cheated is a giveaway that the real problem at the department is not one of competence, but of ideology.

The first step in getting the nation’s laws enforced again will be entrusting enforcement to people who believe in them. We hope the next president will do that.

FILMOCRACY Winners Make a Statement!

After checking out these clips, go to the library and check out the book entitled Food Politics, by Marion Nestle. I highly recommend it.

Repost of: Independent Lens Newsletter: June 23, 2008

KING CORN, one of this season’s favorite docs, provided the backdrop
for the first Filmocracy mashup contest, where we asked people to mix
it up, make a statement and answer the question: If you are what you
eat, what are you?

Many people used the powerful medium of film to illustrate their
point of view on the politics of food, using KING CORN clips and
footage from Getty Images. Participants uploaded their own clips as
well, and mixed it all up with the Eyespot online editing tool.

And without further adieu… the Filmocracy contest winners are:

Grand Prize
“Corn King Takes Over the World” by Kylee Darcy

Highest Rated
“The Politics of Food” by Brandon Savoie

Most Popular
“And So It Is” by Ananta

Watch at:
http://www.pbs.org/filmocracy

Grand prizewinner Kylee Darcy won $1,000 and her stop-motion animated
short, “Corn King Takes Over the World,” will be screened throughout
the country at Indie Lens Community Cinema events this fall. She also
gets a KING CORN DVD, soundtrack and other fabulous corn-free prizes!
The most popular and highest rated videos get cool prizes too.

Darcy, age 19, is a health conscious sophomore at UC Berkeley who is
passionate about food politics. She came across the Filmocracy
contest while conducting research about the relationship between
nutrition and exercise with mental health. For her entry, Darcy
created her own hand-drawn animation and mixed it up with KING CORN
clips and archival images to make a bold and colorful statement about
the politics of food.

The KING CORN filmmakers chose the grand prizewinner, and Eyespot
viewers gave the highest ratings to “The Politics of Food” by Brandon
Savoie. Savoie, a 22-year-old student and forklift operator from
Louisiana, has “a passion for indie filmmaking,” and entered the
contest to comment on the fast food controversy he had read about on
the Internet. “Even if I didn’t win,” he said, “I thought it would be
a good opportunity to help inform others of the irresponsibility of
the major fast food companies.” The winner of Most Popular
designation, “And So It Is” by Ananta, has not responded to our email
request.

Watch the Independent Lens Filmocracy contest shorts winners (all
under 3 minutes) at:
http://www.pbs.org/filmocracy

From the Personal Democracy Forum (PDF08)

Repost from:

http://www.personaldemocracy.com/blog

Daily Digest: Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutley.
By Nancy Scola, 06/24/2008 – 3:54pm

This is Day Two of the 2008 Personal Democracy Forum and we’ll be (mostly) devoting the Daily Digest to a recap of what’s going down at the conference, being discussed in the halls, and heating up the back channels. We’ll return to our regular digest format tomorrow.

Visual presentation virtuoso Larry Lessig at a text-only mid-morning press conference here at PdF ’08: “I’m a little lost because I don’t have slides.”

Google evangelist and wise guy Vint Cerf: “PowerPoint corrupts. PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.”

(Yes, we know Larry uses Keynote in his presentations. But still, that’s a great line.)

Bad weather kept keynoter Elizabeth Edwards away from New York City in body but she was still able to appear at PdF ’08 via Skype, which preformed remarkably well. The upside of Elizabeth staying in North Carolina? Her husband, John, popped into view of Elizabeth’s laptop camera [here’s a photo] and stuck around to say a few words. The New York Times‘ Katharine Seely reports on the tech-focused discussion between Elizabeth and the PdF crowd.

NPR’s Sunday Soapbox “field vlogger” Jacob Soboroff conducted video interviews with MySpace IMPACT’s Lee Brenner, the Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington and Open Left’s Matt Stoller. Also in NPR land, Soapbox’s senior producer Davar Ardalan responds to Jay Rosen’s take on notes on “semi-pro” journalism presented at a PdF panel yesterday morning and posted to TechPres last night, saying that digital integration “brings with it many philosophical questions about editorial control and the ethical rules we have all been trained to follow.”

Over on the tech blog ArsTechnica, Julian Sanchez responds to yesterday’s discussion over the modern media’s “fake neutrality,” to borrow a phrase from Arianna.

Silicon Alley responds to McCain advisor Mark Sohoo’s defense yesterday of his candidate’s relationship with the Internet. The Guardian UK also has coverage of the session under the in-no-way-judgmental headline “Republicans Admit Obama is Winning the Online Battle.” Ooh, this just in: source material — video of the exchange between Mark and John Edwards’ online staffer Tracy Russo that has had people talking since.

CNN’s iReport has a station set up here and the conference and has gone live with interviews and coverage with attendees.

Virtual reality pioneer Mark Pesce gave a keynote this morning on “hyperpolitics — American style” that both Twitter and room tone seemed to indicate was very well-received. If the reporting on the speech strikes you as slightly fuzzy, that’s because I unfortunately arrived at the talk where there was only about three minutes left; no worries, though, because Mark has generously posted the full text of his presentation.

PdF’s Alison Fine has great coverage of Doug Rushkoff talk on “The New Renaissance” and Morely Winegard’s presentation on the civic engagement of the millennial generation.

PC World covers the unveiling of Internet for Everyone, a new Free Press-engineered push for universal broadband launched at PdF ’08 this morning. Nancy Scola (hey, that’s me) has a quick guide to the the bite-sized arguments made by the project’s supporters, from Vint Cerf to Writers Guild East president Michael Winship to TechPres contributor David All.

CNET’s Caroline McCarthy reports on Larry Lessig’s exhortation to the PdF crowd to not fall into the “four-year trap” of keeping a close watch on politics and politicians only when election time rolls around.

Nancy Scola (again, me) reflects upon a session featuring Mayhill Fowler where the OffTheBus contributor called for bloggers to agree to some “code of the road” that creates a safe, off-the-record space for press.

ThePoint.com’s Alex Steed is doing some granular liveblogging of the conference.

Of course, there’s more going on than we can possibly capture. So check out the Twitter stream tagged #pdf2008 on Summize.

1st Amendment? Never heard of it, says FCC

repost from

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/Media Re:public

encouraging collaborative, practical research and analysis of the new media (r)evolution

Persephone Miel – June 24, 2008 @ 5:08 pm · CAPPUCINO, Politics

The FCC says they want to make it easy for someone to deliver wireless broadband for free. But, as we say here at Berkman, there is free as in beer, and free as in speech. And the FCC’s new idea is UNFREE as in speech. Why? Because the license for the spectrum they want to auction requires a mechanism that “filters or blocks images and text that constitute obscenity or pornography and…any images or text that otherwise would be harmful to teens and adolescents. For purposes of this rule, teens and adolescents are children 5 through 17 years of age. As someone pointed out in a gahering here at Berkman just now, that puts the United States right up there with China. Further, the rule states, “should any commercially-available network filters installed not be capable of reviewing certain types of communications, such as peer-to-peer file sharing, the licensee may use other means, such as limiting access to those types of communications.”

The problem is the ruling makes the Internet like broadcast television or radio, where we still can’t use George Carlin’s seven words, when it really should be like the telephone, where it’s none of your @O#*$U# business what I want to talk about. I am neither a lawyer nor a technologist, but I know this is BAD. I read the text (actually I just searched for the word “pornography” and read that bit) and then went here to tell the FCC how I felt. (The comments submission form is very tricky, the 2 relevant dockets are 07-195, and 04-356, but I found it rejected my attempts to put them in myself (got an error message after submitting) so I clicked on proceedings and search for them.

That’s the basic Internet freedom part.

There’s also the sleazy background part about the M2Z, the company that’s pushing this. Business Week points out that one of the two founders of M2Z is a former FCC official. The company’s site encourages visitors to send letters to Congress and the FCC tell them to support “free, family-friendly, nationwide broadband.” Wendy suggested they rename it the “free, family-friendly, FILTERband.”

Awsomely Powerful and Well Done Documentary Film

I saw this film tonight at SilverDocs. It was fantastic. I also got to speak with the Director and the surgeon himself.

The English Surgeon - A Film By Geoffrey Smith.

http://www.theenglishsurgeon.com/thefilm.htm

THE FILM

What is it like to have God like surgical powers, yet to struggle against your own humanity? What is it like to try and save a life, and yet to fail? This film follows brain surgeon Henry Marsh as he openly confronts the dilemmas of the doctor patient relationship on his latest mission to the Ukraine.

Henry is one of London’s foremost brain surgeons, but despite being a pioneer in his field he stills rides an old pushbike to work and worries himself sick about the damage he can inflict on his patients. “When push comes to shove we can afford to lose an arm or a leg, but I am operating on people’s thoughts and feelings…and if something goes wrong I can destroy that person’s character ……forever”.

No Friend of the Workers

Daily Digest: Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutley. By Nancy Scola, 06/24/2008 – 3:54pm

repost from

Daily Digest: Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutley.
By Nancy Scola, 06/24/2008 – 3:54pm