Originally Posted by
Hippiebrian
A bike was designed by MIT students that had no trail and had it's gyroscopic forces neutralized and, when pushed, still stayed up and steered to stany up by itself. I read this through a link on Ecovelo a while back, and unfortunately can;t find this link right now. If I find it, I'll post it.
Yes but it is still not balancing through rider feedback. In fact it had no rider. The fallacy of the original article in this thread was that they saw a bike that balanced without rake and trail and therefore concluded that no other bike balances using rake or trail either. But it's Cracked, so they have an excuse for being stupid.
The MIT bike does the same thing as a normal bike does to steer, just instead of using the weight of the bicycle and rider to turn the front wheel during a lean, it uses an extended weight hanging ahead of the front wheel. Same result, different mechanism. It doesn't preclude the normal function of a normal bike.