If you’ve ever had even a passing interest in the bicycle business, you may have heard of Eurobike.
If you have any aspiration to see more active and small vehicles on our roads, you absolutely must be aware of its place in the world of getting around.
It’s the world’s biggest bike exhibition.
However big you’re imagining, it’s bigger than that – jaw-droppingly so.
I just got back from two full days in Frankfurt with aching limbs and throbbing feet, feeling sure I’d walked a literal marathon between seemingly interminable rows of stands hawking absolutely anything and everything you can conceive of that goes into, on and around bikes.
If there was one stand selling swept-back sunglasses, I swear there were thirty.
And I’d only covered about a third of it.

Boy, the bike business is a manufacturing, economic and employment colossus.
The same astonishing proliferation goes for air-slicing handlebars, masochistic saddles, filigreed chain wheels, brakes apparently tighter and lighter than last year, racer shoes with the lines of beautiful sports cars, knife-sharp frames, fashionably-coloured panniers, headache-inducing lights, condomic inner tubes.
Fifteen hundred exhibitors.

On and on and on it went, until I began to feel as dizzy as someone who’d been too long on a merry-go-round.
But none of that was why I went – indeed felt I had to go.
I went because of what’s happening to what we have for the last 157 years referred to as ‘the bicycle’.
A word coined from the Greek for ‘two’ and ‘circles’.
Its definition is being twisted, tested and stretched in ways some would say belies that etymology.
They’re getting bigger and smaller at the same time.
Vehicles are appearing that feel almost car-sized, and umpteen ‘personal mobility devices’ that you can fit in a shoulder bag are popping like (for those who are old enough, and soon unfortunately perhaps a new generation) measles once did.

Most can be described as what seems to have become almost a religiously-defined type: ‘active mobility’ (i.e. requiring at least some muscular effort to move).
A small but growing number require no muscular input beyond turning a handle or pushing a button (frequently both on the same contraption).
Passive mobility, some have christened that.
Bike puritans are up in their saddles about this situation.
Luckily, Eurobike is run by bike libertines.
What this signifies is a category that, like the Hulk, can simply no longer be contained by its clothes.
Like water, people want to go where they want to go and, whatever our petty, ill-fitting and out-of-date laws say, they’re going to find a way to do so.
This movement – and, if you know the term, it’s much broader than mere ‘micromobility’ – is being fuelled by two tectonic socio-technical forces.

The growing awareness of the limitations of the car as a mode of moving from one place to another.
And better batteries: those lighter, more powerful, more compact bundles of joy power that have made pocketable computers, electric cars and, some might argue, renewable power a practical proposition.
I went to witness this eruption of innovation and boundary-testing that has urbanists (those who care to improve the quality of our lives in settlements) drunk with the possibilities, politicians schizophrenic, and regulators in a tizzy about what to do.
There was much to speculate on about what I saw: new and different vehicles with as many as six wheels and capable of conveying hundreds of kilograms; things you can lift with one hand to bigger-than-golf-carts; dozens and dozens of manufacturers of small motors, sculptural batteries and bike computers that look increasingly like top-of-the-range LED dashboards.
It all signifies change, and a challenge to those who would decide what is allowed and under what circumstances, and what isn’t.
But that’s a tale for another day.