while looking for something else I came across this article:
Frame and Wheel: Fashion Week and the Bicycle Industry
what caught my eye was the voting questions on the right hand side. they seem to be trying to spec out a bicycle based on votes.
obviously there is no perfect bike. but it might be interesting (in a bar sense) to find out what the ideal bike would look like, based on what people here think ? maybe even as an active/on-going thing to keep people interested and coming back to the site. I could see it working as a poll-a-week, culminating in 'the ideal bike is....'
it might give the people that ask the question something to start with. rather than 'what bike please' being answered by BMW/KTM/990/1200GS/DR350, etc, and the usual brand loyalty nonsense... it's 'why a 650', or, 'why 21" front'. which are much better questions, in my view, which demand much better answers.
the questions would need to be well thought out, and too abstract to relate to any real model of motorbike or brand. some examples could be :
- front wheel size : 19, 21, 10
- engine capacity: 250, 350, 650, 750, 1000+
- condition: showroom, rat, faithful-friend, tatty, paris-dakar wannabe
- luggage: hard, soft, none
- sound: loud, soft
my thinking is that the questions should not just be purely technical, because the bike needs soul too. I'm also thinking the questions would be better individually, once per week, because otherwise people would just describe their own bike rather than think about individual aspects. but every 6 months or so we could have a rough idea of what the people here think are the important aspects of a bike for travelling.
obviously I am far too lazy to implement such a thing, anyone else ? :-)