European Velomobile Tour 2013
Bigest problem facing the expansion of the velomobile market is obscurity. There are plenty of people who could see the practical advantages of using a velomobile, and would interested in owning one, but for the low number of velomobiles around the world meaning that very few people have ever heard of them, never mind about having the opportunity to ride in one.
In 2011, Josef Janning’s extremely successful ROAM (Roll Over AMerica) saw over 40 riders travel 5000km (over 3000miles) across 4 weeks of travel, going coast-to-coast, west-to-east across the USA to showcase the benefits and practicalities of velomobiles for long-distance travel. So I was very excited to read about the ongoing plans for a European tour for 2013.
Nothing is finalised yet, but on reading through the main discussion thread, I was glad to see that the tour had an organiser, a set of options for the date, and a provisional route for a 2500km (1600mile), 3 week loop through Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands and back to Germany.
Just the idea that it’s possible to ride for 100miles per day, for 4-5 days in a row, without being a trained athlete shows just how practical a velomobile is!
I’d love to be part of the tour, although I’m not going to commit to anything until I have a rolling velo, so until then, the main discussion forum is on the ‘BentRider Online forums > Roll over Europe 2013? thread and under CraftGeek’s heading, there’s a website-in-testing already up at logical-vehicles.org.
In addition to the main English language thread, there are also German, French fora too.
The best name I’ve seen so far for the tour has to be “EUROLL” but is that seems to be in use by a roller-shutter firm, maybe something like “EuRollVelo” might be more descriptive than the currently leading “Euro Tour 2013”. But that’s just my opinion…
Sean Havins wrote, “Patrick, We would love to have you too. I've moved the start date to July due to the vacation schedules of many of our riders. I'm thinking we'll start on July 22, but need to get more feed back first before I finalize the date. Yeah, I'm not enamored with the current name either. But it needs to make sense to English, German, French and other listeners. If you want to poll your readers fo a better name I'll keep an open mind. I've heard that velo is a very generic term in some languages so I avoided it. The sponsorship site should be live soon (this week?) I need to start funding this beast. yay. If you have any questions send me an email. Sean Havins Organiser, Euro Tour 2013.”