When is a bike not a bike?

Happy new year!

I've posted a couple times recently, about the arrival and acceptance of "E-bikes" on the "no motor vehicles" Greenbelt and other bicycle infrastructure, and sidewalks, in our community.  I continue to have serious reservations about how it's all going to mesh, or not, during the busy summer months.  Time will tell.

We've had some interesting developments at the office "bike room" as well, over the past year or so.  (By "we," I really mean the people who manage the facility.  But most of them are friends of mine... and the majority are bike commuters as well.)

First it was the guy who rode his low-slung "tadpole trike."  You know... one of those contraptions with two wheels in the front, one in the back, and not quite as high as the hood of a passenger car.  (I worry about the safety of those things, in places where they share pavement with cars... but that's a different subject.)  The tadpole trike takes up three or more bicycle spaces, in the bike parking facility.  (NOT a problem in January... but six months from now?  That room gets pretty crowded on a nice day!)

Then a guy started riding this big "fat bike" with the pedal-assist motor.  The tires are too wide to fit in the bike racks... and I guess it's too heavy for him to lift up onto wall hooks.  (The bike room has some very nice custom features - a horizontal bike rack along one wall, that accepts tires of various widths - but it was built "BFB" - before fat bikes.  On the other walls, there are sturdy rails that bikes can be locked to, and hooks that accept a front wheel for vertical parking.  But you need adequate upper-body strength to hoist your bike onto the hook.)

And then... starting in the past week or so, some guy has been riding one of the biggest bikes I've ever seen, and parking it in the room.  At least I think it's a bike, in the same sense that a Hummer or Ford Excursion is a "car" - it sorta looks like a bike.  But - it occupies more space than either of my motorcycles.  Check it out!

Actually, it is a bike - a Surly Big Fat Dummy - and it has been customized with some interesting features - the big bike-mounted mitten thingies for the rider's hands.  Bags on the back.  Some sort of passenger accommodations... a seat maybe?  I can't tell because it's covered by some sort of thing that's apparently attached to the bike... it looks like a silver rain poncho with a hole for a neck.  But is it a child's neck that goes through there, or a dog's neck, or what?  Maybe at some point I'll get to see it, rolling down the pavement and loaded in all its glory... and I'll understand.

I'm sorta hoping this is just a "winter thing."  IMO, you don't need 4 1/2 inch wide tires to traverse what little snow we've had so far; I've been doing it mostly on 1 1/4 inch tires.  This thing would probably be better suited to Fairbanks, or maybe Minneapolis or Steamboat.  And there won't be room for it in our bike room that already gets very crowded in the summer.

On snowy days, my poor friend Dave rides a "fat bike" that looks pretty tiny by comparison.  You can see it - and the "tadpole"- in the second photo.  But it's pretty awkward for him to lift his fat bike down off the rack, when trying to maneuver around the "morbidly obese bike" (by comparison).