Meet The Sideways Bike - A Contraption You Ride Like a Snowboard

Some time ago an Irish inventor woke up, probably had his whiskey and then started thinking, “O.K. So I like to ride bikes. Hmm. I also like to ride snowboards. Hmm. I think I’ll make a snowboarding bike.” I don’t know, I’m just guessing this might be a scenario in which someone would come up with something like this.

Not a bad initiative, though, if you ask me. It seems a good idea to take a sport like snowboarding and bring it to our streets. But how does something like this happen? Obviously, it took some engineering and design to get the ball rolling.

As far as funding, design and engineering, nothing is known except that the Sideways Bike is based on the principles of snowboarding. So we could call it the ‘Snowboarding Bike’ after all. Even the first functional concepts were dubbed ‘Sideways Bike’, but at the time of the third and final concept, the name ‘Snowboard Bicycle’ took over.

What you are looking at is quite simple. It looks more like a scooter with a seat and pedals. But then you notice the two handle-bars, one attached to the front wheel, the second to the back. From there it’s just looks like one big piece of equipment used for training the body that you could probably find at your closest beach-gym.

The way you sit on it and the way you steer this thing are really what offer that weird position on the bike. So there’s a seat in the middle, very similar to that of a unicycle. That seat, however, isn’t facing forward. Rather, it’s facing toward the lateral part of the device.

So basically, you're moving forward with your right shoulder leading the way and not your chest. Below the seat you’ll see the two redesigned pedals that offer the propulsion for this thing. A chain system, similar to that of a traditional bicycle, allows the rear tire to push you forward.

Now here’s where this contraption gets tricky. The front of the scooter-bike, because I still can’t get snowboard-bike out of my mouth, pivots to offer steering ability like any other scooter. But then so does the back wheel. Yeah. Even the back wheel allows for movement like that of the front. This allows the scooter-snow-bike to produce some very sharp turns similar to those of carving through the snow on a snowboard. Fine, I’ll call it the snowboard-bike too.

But this type of maneuvering is seemingly difficult to do. You have to maneuver the front and back wheel at the exact same angle, otherwise, I’m guessing you’re gonna get some pretty good speed wobbles. However, it seems that the majority of attention required to turn the vehicle, isn’t focused on the wheels, but rather the leaning motions the rider must go through, exactly like on a snowboard.

So is this thing a success or not? I don’t know. All I know is that I would love an occasion to ride something like this.