When Judah Schiller discovered that the new portion of the Bay Bridge bike path in San Francisco would only go halfway across, he decided to adapt his own bike to get to work – on water! With previous design experience (as the co-founder of Saatchi & Saatchi S and AIKO Agency), he ordered a bike kit from an Italian manufacturer, adapted his own mountain bike and started experimenting. He has since become the first person to water bike across the San Francisco Bay and even biked across the Hudson River in New York!
The kit Schiller uses can fit in a backpack and consists of two inflatable pontoons, a small propeller and a mount that attaches to the bicycle. It takes about 15 minutes to set it all up and five minutes to take it down and is “a lot more practical and enjoyable than spending an hour stuck in rush hour gridlock in a tunnel or on a bridge,” according to Schiller.
The intrepid entrepreneur has set up an organization called BayCycle to develop affordable and practical water bike kits by 2015 through an IndieGoGo campaign and hopes to help bike commuters ride on water in one of the world’s most bike-friendly cities.
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