No - it is definitely a single gear bike. The cantilever design would make it quite hard to accomodate a hub gear and derailier would be out with a belt.

The gear is 56 inches which is surprisingly adequate for my use around town, and I have a steep valley to deal with in some of my daily activities. I just get off and wheel it up the steep bits, but they are very steep. Ordinary inclines are not a problem.

It is important to remember the environment that the design was meant for - urban mixed mode commuting. There is an account somewhere of a guy who rode a Strida the length of New Zealand (both islands??? I don't know) but that is not what it was intended to do.

Be WARY - as I have said there are many factories turning these out. I have only seen one and ridden it now 35 miles. Also, you will be on your own if it drops apart. SesameCrunch has replaced the plastic shelled eccentric BB with an original Strida5 item and someone swapped out a front disk brake for another one, so I have no reason to suppose I'll not be able to get genuine Strida bits if I want them. To be honest though, if it had to go into the junk in a year's time, I wouldn't be desolate at this price and then I might buy a real one if I still like the idea.

Not wanting to insult REAL strida riders at all, or Mr Saunders, but let's not forget when we are going on about quality that some of the early stridas were far from durable according to easily found accounts on the web. My father bought one of the very first ones and it was awful. He returned it within days. They had all kinds of plastic parts and some of these were only recently superseded with the Strida 5. (BB shell for example). Now I realise that it takes a massive amount of skill to develop a thing like this bike and that I don't have what it takes in the least - hat off to the inventor and his partners, but to look at some of the comments on the other S forum, you'd really think the knockoff was a monstrous sacrilege, and an insult to a perfect device.