Take the pedals off the bike

I learned Spanish at a two year old level by focusing only on the top 24 verbs, in all (major) tenses first. So, ir, ser, estar, tener, haber, hacer, poner, poder, venir, ver, decir, dar, etc., in present, preterite, imperfect, future, conditional, subjunctive, progressives, and perfects.

Then I learned about 2000 nouns from several lists. Then I learned some common "weird" constructions like darse cuenta, and hace falta.

Now I can read paperbacks on the plane without a dictionary, and follow the plot. I can communicate simply, and send pretty good texts. I have a lot of trouble with TV and radio, but it's progress. This took 2 years with mainly self study and Duolingo for accountability. I don't think an app alone would do the trick.

> Learn to speak German like a 5 year old

This is pretty much the methodology behind "comprehensible input", where you consume lots of content that you can just about understand and "let your brain figure it out".

There's quite a lot along these lines. LingQ helps you learn as you read books, and I built https://nuenki.app, which gives you constant comprehensible input as you browse the web.

I also really like Language Transfer, which isn't really a comprehensible input course, but tries to draw parallels to English and talks through the etymology a little. The approach appeals to me.

There are resources available for children, eg Muzzy is an animated immersion program for 5 year olds that (if you can bear the cheesy animation) might work. (In the US, available on Kanopy with a public library card.) And if you are good at searching you might also find resources that educators use for teaching recently immigrated children, although that implicitly requires a teacher/partner to be working with you.

Everyone learns languages in a different way. There are some people who like to be told what the basic rules of the language are and can use that to structure new sentences. Like giving someone K&R I suppose. Other people need to hear it. Personally, because I am only learning a language for practical purposes like travel, I'd love a course that dispensed with the grammar and taught contemporary phrases used in everyday life. For example, I am never going to ask and be told where the library is. But I'm very likely to hear, "cash or card?" or to ask "does this train go to Bologna?". So practicality for me wins early on, and then later I'd like to learn the top 500 words, and then the grammar structures.

I have a theory about language acquisition that I've never had the time to fully explore, that developing an ear for a language is the critical first step.

To that end, my theory would be that a program of imitation & mimicry would be the most effective way to learn. That you would hear a native speaker say a phrase and attempt to fluently imitate it. Specifically, record your voice as you speak and listen to what you say and try to as perfectly as possible imitate the prototype phrase.

Learn vocabulary and grammar later; focus, like children do, on hearing the language and imitating its use. Learn reading and writing last of all; formal grammar and especially spelling are the pedals on the bike.

Checkout Learncraft Spanish. The step they take to simplify that others do not is that they focus knly on grammer for a very lokg time, and just use english verbs and nouns.

For example, at a certain point the only words you will have learned are que and lo, so the quiz sentances will be like :

I want you to eat it -> I want que lo you eat

This prpgram has been extremely useful to me and helped me learn spanosh far quicker than other methods. They also use memory palace techniques and have an unusually effective way of organizing vocab learning

Author of the piece here, I speak three languages (Norwegian, English, and Spanish) and am currently working on a fourth (Japanese).

"Taking the pedals off the bike" advice for language learning:

- Learn pronunciation first

A lot of people never master a native (or semi-native) accent, but if you sit down and figure it out, it's easier than it seems at first. Getting the native pronunciation down matters because otherwise you literally can't distinguish between certain words, and it will be a habit you'll never unlearn. It makes everything else easier. It also gives you massive cred with native speakers who will overlook your atrocious grammar and paltry vocab because "wow, you sound good! I'm impressed." It's taken both as a sign of respect and that you're putting in the effort, and makes you punch above your actual weight. This does wonders for confidence and makes you less shy about trying to learn by speaking & listening, which is crucial.

Gabriel Wyner does a good job explaining it in his book "Fluent Forever" (his method is pretty cool too but I have some critiques of it overall, "learn pronunciation first" is the best single lesson to transfer to other language learning methodologies).

If you haven’t checked out the Pimsleur[0] app, you might find it useful for learning a language.

It’s the only language learning system that has ever worked for me. It focuses on speaking and every day language rather than reading, writing, and memorizing vocabulary, conjugations, etc.

It isn’t cheap, but it’s designed for you to learn enough to not need it anymore.

It probably doesn’t work for everyone, but it did feel like a different approach than many of the other language apps I tried in the past.

[0]: https://www.pimsleur.com/

That sounds rather like the way the Pimsleur approach teaches. It drills fundamentals of grammar through fairly basic "travel vocabulary," but once you have that foundation you can go pretty far.

Piaget is well known in teaching circles as a philosophical father of pedagogy. A (slightly) less know pedagogist is Vygotsky, who invented the term “Zone of Proximal Development”. The idea is that kids can learn from others and from experimentation if you can design activities where you take the skills they currently have, consider the skill you want them to acquire, and build steps between them that a child can succeed in. To develop this example: once a child can walk, they can learn to balance by being given a task which allows them to safely experiment with falling over and staying upright. Once they can balance, you can experiment with moving while balancing. Once they can move forward with balancing, they can learn stopping safely. Finally, they should be ready to learn how to pedal.

If you don’t allow them to complete all the previous steps, they may just keep failing at the next task, because they’re not yet in the “zone” to be able to acquire the next skill.

If a child can’t balance annd move forwards unaided, they won’t be able do the next thing (pedalling) even with help.

Children have different skills and capabilities and Vygotsky is not prescriptive about who needs to help, and the ZPD theory often encourages learning from peers rather than adults (parents/teachers).

Don’t Miss the Post for the Trees – Here’s Why Most People Do

You see it all the time. A post comes through your feed. It's insightful. It’s bold. It’s… mostly ignored.

Why? Because people don’t actually engage with the core idea — they react to what they think it says.

The same thing happens in business: - Founders get stuck in the weeds of their product without seeing the bigger market opportunity. - Teams hyper-focus on the tech, missing the customer pain point. - Investors hear the pitch, but miss the deeper vision driving it.

People miss the post for the trees.

Here’s the thing: breakthroughs happen when you push past surface-level reactions. The best founders? They’re not just building products — they’re connecting dots others miss. The best marketers? They’re not just optimizing campaigns — they’re shifting narratives. The best investors? They’re not chasing trends — they’re seeing past the noise.

If you want to stand out in a noisy world, here’s the question to ask yourself: Am I reacting to the surface? Or am I leaning in to understand what’s really being said?

The magic is always in the nuance. The signal is often buried in the noise. The big ideas? They’re the ones that most people scroll past.

So… don’t.

(I'm sorry I had to)

I've taught several snowboarders how to ride and the teaching process is about putting them in a position where they forget about the distracting things.

Always start them on a blue (or blue-black) slope, because it forces them to learn to use the edge of the board. Lot of easy drills like side slipping and simply turning your head to control direction.

If you start a snow boarder on a green run, it always results in them catching an edge and eventually face planting. Not a fun experience.

that might be a good analogy because, generally speaking, skiing is much, much harder without poles (hence an expert would never do it (unless they are hitting an olympic vert ramp or something)), but it is exactly for this reason that the poles distract you from learning the "right" lesson-- people use their poles pretty much randomly at the start, and the poles help them... to do the wrong thing. but once you have the real crux of skiing down-- body position and balance + using your edges and weight shifts to turn-- poles are completely trivial to add.

great analogy!

When my kids learned to ski, it was without poles. The poles are an encumbrance, not only on the slope, but getting onto the tow rope.

Likewise, music. The most popular method -- Suzuki -- starts kids out without sheet music. Reading comes later.

In both cases, it's also just less gear to manage. The benefit becomes obvious in group lessons and recitals.

I took skiing lessons a couple years ago. This is how it was done. I can't say it was any easier as I had never skied before and I never will again.

Maybe that's part of the reason why "strider" bikes are becoming a lot more common for toddlers to learn how to ride a bike. They're effectively what the OP describes, a bike with no pedals that you run and then balance on.

Sort of a sit-down, off-road push scooter!

That is an interesting video! Your writing made me expect the neural network had changed gravity as hacky part of its solution, but it's the creator trying to train a neural network to balance a simulated double pendulum and failed, and then wondered if he could train a simpler version in a simulation with no gravity and high friction to make it easy, then see if the solution can gradually be retrained to cope as he adjusts those to full gravity and normal friction. The visualisations in it are very good.

Same with my daughter. We tried with balance bike, but she didn't adopt it and didn't find it fun to try. We went to training wheels and she was immediately motivated. And at the same time, I've heard success stories with balance bikes from my friends.

Kids are different, try out different things.

This, in my opinion, proves that different people might need different things. And, in turn, many immensely able and skilled ones fail at standard route (e.g. successful writers fail at school).

It’s fairy obvious but I like to keep this poka-yoke’ish concept in mind: it’s not about the person, it’s about the process.

problem is peadling, we used some 4 wheel thing to get this going.

The difficult part is not balance but looking ahead. When you are first learning to use the pedals, you instinctively LOOK at them. That's what makes it difficult. I learned on a standard bike but did not pedal until somone encouraged me to try. I was going downhill fast and everything without using the pedals. :)

Yeah, this is the way. I don't know why the training wheels route is still so ingrained here. Probably also some kids start there, and not on a balance bike (wrong imo).

I struggled learning how to ride a bike. Training wheels made it difficult for me so my dad took them off and I struggled more because I didn't understand speed = balance. I gave up and asked for a Razer scooter for Christmas instead. A few years later, I'm at a family event (without my scooter) and I'm watching my cousins ride around the culdesac on their bikes making it look super easy. I hopped on one of their bikes and just started pedalling, it was so easy. Ran back inside to show my parents and they were happy for me but incredibly confused how I just learned how to ride a bike without any real instruction. Maybe a Razer scooter helped me with balance and not being afraid to go fast, I can see how a scooter is similar to a walking bike.

training/support wheels address the wrong part of what's "hard" about riding a bike. They also encourage the kid to sit down and look at their feet, limit where you can ride, make pedaling harder, provide false security (if you've ever seen a kid tip), and steal all the fun from riding a bike. Bikes are awesome because your body inputs have such an impact on what happens; training wheels make a bike like driving a car.

"Das sind Stürzräder, nicht Stützräder." sigh

Inevitably the rear end slides out, the bike tips over or the support wheel/brace fails.

Slowly. They're meant for children.

Snap - my son loved his balance bike and would even ride it around the house. We got him a 'good' bicycle (about £140) and he learnt to ride it in about 10 minutes, and same as your child - he rode home and from that moment on he loved his bike.

My daughter never enjoyed or wanted a balance bike, and only gave up her three wheeled scooter about age 7. We tried getting her to cycle a few times, but she couldn't get her head around it. Then last summer she grabbed a 2 wheeled scooter and picked them up quite fast, and the evolution from that to the bicycle seemed pretty easy. We just had to wait until she was ready and interested - I'd tried to encourage her before, but my style for everything now it just to riff off their interests and let them find their place.

Same for swimming, I went swimming with a friend who tried to teach their child 'drills' - which obviously bored them (both). I just let my kids jump in and dive for sinkies - in time (swimming twice a week) they have developed further and further - but they are always up for the pool as they know I'll let them do what they want and focus on having fun.

My neighbor who already knew how to ride a balance bike thought herself how to ride a bike all on her own at 4-5 years old. I was in the hammock watching her roll down a small incline where getting to pedaling is even easier than on a flat. That was an amazing moment watching another human being having an absolutely awesome day. She might be exceptionally good at this though she is now 12 and rides unicycles

Yeah, I used to take our daughter to nursery on her balance bike. I could tell when she started doing little bursts of speed so that she could put her feet up and coast for a while that she had picked up the essentials of balancing.

She did have a bike with stabilisers but she didn't use it much like that as she didn't enjoy it. Between getting "high sided" on bumps and the feeling of falling over before the wheels took the weight.

When her first friend started riding properly she asked me to teach her to ride without stabilisers. I bought one of the push bars from Amazon which was a confidence booster for both of us as I could run behind her and make sure she was safe. It only took 5 minutes before she was riding off on her own. Sadly she got a bit over confident and had a bit of a spill which gave her a bleeding lip which set her back a couple of weeks but the next time she was off without assistance almost immediately.

A few months later she was cycling 10km around the Ile d'oleron in France!

I prayed for long stretches of dry days during the summer when I was a kid, because we had a tree-lined trail with an incline leading to a back field. The trees were such that there was little to no grass on the house side of the trail, so when it dried up nice it would become dusty and loose. My siblings and I would spend all day taking turns ripping down that trail then locking up the brakes to go sliding into the dirt patch, sending up dust clouds and competing to see who could make the biggest.

We kept this up into our teens (bc we were rural way outside of town and our parents were luddites about the internet so we had little else to do after playing all our video games to death) and I got to the point I could drift down the latter portion of the trail and right the bike and ride away without touching the ground. I had moved on to a regular "mountain" bike by my teens so I had to tighten my rear brake and true my wheel so it didn't rub to get enough stopping force to lock out the rear wheel. At one point I was using that move as a core workout lol. (That and side flips on the trampoline.)

You can definitely lock up the rear wheel with hand brakes. Still happens to me semi-regularly purely by accident when I have to stop suddenly.

You can even do 360s with coaster brakes. We wore out many tires at the park down the road from my house. It had a gentle slope that got you up to the perfect speed for coaster break fun on the smooth asphalt entrance road.

You could technically footjam, just need to show the kids enough BMX or fixed gear videos first...

It's very true! (about locking the wheel with coaster breaks)

I broke my jaw this way when I was 6 or 7. :-) Tried to do a 90 degree skid going down a steep alley and did an endo, landing on my chin. Do not recommend.

I mean, I probably would have broken some bones anyway with the way I biked at that age, but this particular one might not have happened without the coaster breaks.

We haven't quite gotten to that stage with my 7yo yet. 12yo wasn't too rough on her bike but 7yo is, um, er, let's say he doesn't have the wisdom of being older yet.

You started out so well, but then it all broke.

While this whole thread is heavily dominated by bashing on training wheels (deservedly so, I can say having tried to teach a full blown 29 year old to ride bikes), this incentive/motivation inversion you mention is interesting.

"Protections/guards" of some kind are so common (not just in software/tech, but all life) that "training wheels" has become a huge metaphor/analogy. I wonder how many other examples there are of the motivation inversion?

My parents taught me to ride by pushing the bike down a small hill with me on it! Lol

Same thing though. I was ruding the bike like a boss pretty quickly.

Usually people get balance bikes for kids that are too small for a normal bike, so they use it for some time before they get tall enough to change (around a year or 2).

A balance bike is a way of transportation for kids, they can use balance bikes for a long time before they are comfortable with biking with pedals. We are talking years with a balance bike and then there is an overlap where they prefer the balance bike.

It is also alot more light weight than a normal bike so it is actually better for you and the kid. I transported a kid and a balance bike easily on a normal bike for more than 20 km, they managed about 10 km on their own.

We got about two years per kid out of it (age 2-4). 4 years of amortized bike for something like $100 seemed pretty good, and it was in good enough shape after that we gave it to a neighbor. It's definitely not a 5 minute thing if used as the primary bike for a child too young for a pedal bike.

> I'm not buying a toy that gets used for 5 minutes only

Round here loads of kindergarten-age kids use their balance bike for transportation every single day. I saw one zooming along behind her/his parent (who was pushing another kid along in a buggy) first thing this morning.

> toy

A toy? The balance bike was our kid's secondary mode of transportation for 2.5 years, after our bike trailer.

How old was your kid? I mean apart from learning to balance itself there is a matter of how strong the thigh muscles are in order to pedal. If your kid was like 5 then it makes sense that it would not be that interesting. If your kid is like 3 or sth, then a balance bike can be a great means of transportation for them. They can use it really a lot and enjoy it, until they can actually pedal on a normal bike in a way that it can be practical. The point of the balance bike is not "to learn balance", but to actually be used for moving around.

Balance bikes are super cheap, very light, and the kid uses it for like a year or more until you are ready to buy the proper bike

Isla has folded, sadly (though they're still selling replacement parts for now). A shame: their machines really were magnificent. We have also been running through them (mostly second-hand) and selling them on, and it's been a cheap and excellent means of primary transport.

Yes, I see this all the time around my neighborhood, kids get so used to the training wheels, they can just hop off their bike and leave it there while they play some other games. And then they just jump back on the bike. Those bikes can also have all tons of silly accessories, like baskets, ribbons, huge bells, it's not like the kid has to hold the bike upright or learn how to lean it against a wall or on the ground. And then I heard a parent say his kid doesn't want to take off the training wheels, they tried it once for a day and she hated it. Gee, wonder why, now they are waiting for the 5-yearold to tell them when she's ready to take them off. Good luck with that.

All three of my kids were riding full bikes around 3 years old, having used a balance bike for 12-18 months previous. I don’t think my kids are exceptional - balance bikes work wonders!

She doesn't have very athletic parents, so she regularly exceeds my expectations for her, but she's not a particular standout otherwise!

Probably the more relevant factor: we replaced one of cars with a cargo bike when she was 15 months old, so she does 1500+ miles a year "on" a bike, and a tiny fraction of that in a car (we live in a totally car-centric US city, so this is pretty out of the norm). Bikes are the fabric of her daily life so she is really, really motivated to spend time on a bike.

Oh man yeah the advice about continuous motion is not right. A clutch is a torque control device, in the case of a car it’s more like a torque limiting device. The more you let the pedal out the more torque you allow the engine to apply to the wheels up until the point where the torque you allow exceeds the engine’s available torque at a given rpm and throttle position. So if you’re constantly letting the clutch out you’re ramping up the torque limit linearly but the engine speed and wheel speed don’t match and if the engine speed is low of course the engine can easily stall.

Instead what you want to do, what most people do subconsciously is let the clutch out partially until it is allowing the engine to apply some of its available torque but not all, and then pause there until the car’s speed roughly matches the engine speed, at which point the clutch will stop slipping even though you still have the pedal partially depressed, after which you should be able to rapidly raise your foot from the clutch and feel no acceleration or deceleration. For an experienced driver that pause is less than like half a second from standstill. Also technically the point at which you want to pause the clutch let out depends on a whole bunch of things like how quickly you want to pull off, how much torque the engine can provide and whether you’re on a hill etc, but we just do this intuitively with experience.

This is like a super over-complicated way to think about it and I would never try to teach a learner driver by first explaining this lol but the point is, you find the engagement point and hold there for a while and then release when the car is moving. This is what we all do but it helps to understand why we do it so we don’t explain things wrong.

I feel like people also don’t get what applying more throttle does while the clutch is slipping. All it does is raise the engine rpm, it will apply absolutely no more torque (and therefore acceleration) no matter how much you press down the throttle. While the clutch is slipping the clutch pedal controls your torque and therefore acceleration. You need some throttle though to give you some room for error and some minimum torque to work with.

I think this is basically the same thing, just with the other steps included. On the right surface in first gear you don't need the brake, so just controlling the clutch is enough to move the car

Someone recently told me that petrol and diesel engines with manual transmission feel very different. He told me that driving his dad's manual transmission diesel engine was easier because the clutch was "more forgiving". I cannot driving manual, so I have no idea about it. My guess: That tractor is diesel.

Wonder if you could do it with the front of the car jacked up.

Apparently the tradition continues. On our Peugeot 407, the button to open the boot (trunk) is in the "0" on the "407" badge.

I vaguely remember my training wheels were set a bit higher and not touching the ground unless I was leaning a lot. So this setup would aid training to ride properly.

You may be right. I read this on the late Sheldon Brown's website, and it stuck. References:

    https://www.sheldonbrown.com/tancrank.html
    Left-threaded pedals and cranks are reputedly an invention of the Wright brothers, bicycle builders from Dayton, Ohio. (They also built airplanes). 

    https://www.sheldonbrown.com/brandt/left.html
    The left-threaded left pedal was not the result of armchair theorizing, it was a solution to a real problem: people's left pedals kept unscrewing! We have read that the left threading was invented by the Wright brothers, but we are not sure of this.

Apparently it's actually an effect of the thread precessing into the hole. Interesting.

I think it must be regional. They're universal in the UK now so there's no way you could have a kid and not know about them. Nobody had them when I was young though. Presumably they just haven't quite infiltrated America yet.

The use case is very little kids. They can use a balance bike about the same time they can toddle about the house (but before they can walk longer distances without support or tumbles).

> I didn't even bother with a broomstick for my kids. I just ran along, holding the cargo rack.

Yeah. The story in my family is that my dad decided to teach me how to ride. We drove to a park to do it because our road was too busy. He got the bike out of the car first, and went back to get the broomstick. By the time he was back I was already cycling away from him. Undoubtedly due to all my experience with balance bikes. :)

But possibly to this day I couldn't ride if someone would grab my handlebars and push me for a bit then release them at some point. :D

Exactly this. The article has the right conclusion but invents a nonsense explanation. The truth is that bicycles counter-steer at any reasonable rolling speed - to go right, you nudge the steering to the left, which causes the bike to start falling to the right and then steer into that fall. People often find this hard to believe, even experienced riders, but it is easily tested. The problem is that training wheels turn a bicycle into a tricycle, which steers in the opposite way - to go right you steer to the right. So kids learn that and then you take the training wheels off and the first attempt to steer immediately causes a nasty fall because of steering the wrong way. I made this mistake teaching my first to ride, and she hurt herself and never really liked bikes after that. Seeing it happen, I had an epiphany (eventually) and just took the pedals off that bike for my second, who had the experience described elsewhere in this thread and loved bikes thereafter.

I have seen kids learn to ride with training wheels. Basically the training wheels are raised relative to the rear wheel and the child learns to balance the bike on the tires, with the training wheels only touching when the bike leans over. But that only teaches them how to balance the bike when riding in a straight line. Not start, turn, or stop.

You might have been older, though. So with a balance bike you could've learned to bike years earlier. If you already had mastered balance, learning to bike isn't a big leap.

Thanks! Corrected!

Here's what I originally typed out before googling:

The "something about the geometry" is called caster, and is the same effect that makes the front casters on a shopping cart go straight: the point where the steering axis intersects the ground is ahead of the contact patch of the tire. On a bike, this is mostly determined by the angle of your head tube when looking at the bike from the side (if the fork is "bent" from the side view, this would also contribute to the caster effect).

But I've now googled, and found a paper that says that a bike can be stable without gyroscopic or caster effects [1]. It seems like the specific mass distribution of the steerable mass (front wheel, fork, handlebars, etc) vs the rest of the frame matters, and of course all of these variables interact in complex ways. They do agree that caster plays an important role though.

Vehicle dynamics is notoriously tricky stuff. I can say with experience that it doesn't get easier when you go to four wheels.

[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/51051995_A_Bicycle_...

> but there is something about the geometry of a bike that is sort of self correcting.

Yup. Plenty of videos on youtube where they send a bike down a hill with no rider and as long as there is forward motion it will self-correct and stay upright.

Bikes in motion are self-balancing, and with no rider on, will continue indefinitely until the forward momentum has been exhausted.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcZCzr9ExKk

This is because gyroscopic forces are not significant except at high speed, and most of the forces relevant to cycling and which direction the bicycle goes are generated between the front tire and road surface. Turning the handlebars to change direction is also only relevant at low speed for the same reason.

Can you clarify what is it exactly that you consider counter-steering?

My understanding is that it means "briefly turning the handle-bars to point the front wheel in the opposite direction of the intended turn, causing the vehicle to start tipping over in the direction of intended turn", which is exactly how you steer both motorcycle and bicycle.

I too am a motorcyclist (and now, mostly, a cyclist) and think I may have misspoke (steering vs counter-steering).

When I learned to ride a motorcycle I was taught to push the handle bars with the hand on the side I wanted to turn (so, if trying to turn right, push with the right hand); this causes the bike to "fall" on the side of the turn, and follow the turn.

This is what I meant by "counter-steering" but 1/ it only works at relatively high speeds (above, say, 20 mph, which isn't high on a motorcycle, but pretty high on a bike) and 2/ it doesn't "prevent" the bike from falling, it makes it fall, which is what we want.

Following the same principle, staying upright on a bicycle involves steering, not counter-steering: when a bike starts falling to one side, turning the wheel to that side makes it want to fall to the other side; and if done fast enough and often enough (as all riders to), maintain the bike upright.

Counter-steering is how bicycles steer, whether you're doing it consciously or not.

In France and Belgium, Decathlon makes neat bikes with pedals that can be taken off easily and properly (including the cranks) turning them into a "normal" draisienne.

This means the kids can easily try it with pedals on, take them off again if it doesn't work, etc, and it looks less like a "baby bike" (which matters for some kids). I think they're really nice.

Yes, I’m surprised that this is apparently something new for Americans. I thought that was a basic kids toy that’s common everywhere, like skipping ropes or slides.

In the US perhaps, where I live the whole cyclists vs non-cyclist thing does not exist. Everybody is a cyclist (perhaps the US is a car community ;)), but generally in normal clothes, on a normal bike (not racing, but like this [0]), with no helmet and on bike lanes where you never meet a car. The smallest bikes (12 inch wheels) are rated 2-4 years old.

[0] https://duckduckgo.com/?q=cortina+u1&t=ffab&iax=images&ia=im...