Originally Posted by
kingston
OK first of all, I never claimed that a recumbent is not a bike. I refer to recumbent bikes as “recumbents” and bikes as “bikes”, not because I deny that a recumbent is a bike, but because the communication is quite clear when I call recumbents recumbents and bikes bikes. Sorry if that offends you. I never heard of a DF bike or an upright bike or whatever you guys call bikes before this thread so it’s very unnatural for me to use an adjective to describe a bike.
You're going to lose all credibility here if you continue to give UCI bikes the sole claim to being called, "bikes." If it's appropriate to distinguish between styles, you should use the correct names. The proper term for them is "Safety Bicycles," or "Safeties." "Uprights" or to a lesser extent "DFs" are also considered acceptable to use in mixed company, as long as the poor benighted upright riders realize that "F" doesn't stand for an obscene word. Safeties were given that name when they started replacing Ordinaries, because putting the rider's center of gravity between the two equal-sized wheels drastically cut down on the riders doing 'headers' from 5-6 feet in the air. They still do them, but now it's from only 3-4 feet in the air.