The bike is upright again and goes straight. Moving the front wheel to the left steers both wheels underneath the center of gravity. ![]() If the bike falls to the left, the front wheel turns to the left. The authors concluded that the bike steered into the lean because the mass distribution makes the front fork fall faster than the rear frame when the bike starts to lean. Even if it was pushed sharply sideways (see the researcher push the bike in the movie below), it would right itself and continue to roll. To test this, they built a bicycle with negative trail and a second set of wheels that spin in the opposite direction and cancel the gyroscopic forces of the wheels (see photo on top of this post).Īs predicted by their calculations, this bicycle was able to roll without falling over, as long as it remained above a certain speed. Their paper was published in the prestigious journal Science this month, so we now can share their findings and discuss the implications.īased on theoretical calculations, they discovered that neither trail nor gyroscopic forces are required to make a bicycle stable. In the past, it has been assumed that either the gyroscopic forces of the front wheel cause the wheel to steer into the lean, or that geometric trail and related forces re-align the front wheel.īicycle Quarterly contributor Jim Papadopoulos was part of a team of researchers from the Technical University in Delft (Netherlands) and Cornell University who examined the stability of bicycles. When a bicycle starts falling over, it automatically steers into the lean, thus righting itself (see video below). This matches our on-the-road experience of having to adjust a bike’s geometry for different wheel sizes, load placements, etc.įor more than a century, scientists have tried to resolve why bicycles are self-stable, that is, why they tend to stay upright even without rider input. ![]() When one parameter is altered, then the other parameters may need to be changed to arrive at a stable bicycle again. No single parameter (e.g.: trail, head angle, wheel size, weight distribution) determines whether a bicycle is stable or not. ![]() New theoretical research in bicycle stability shows that many parameters interact to make a bicycle stable.
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