I arrived for my first visit to San Francisco with the idea of getting myself a bike to explore the city. Voilà — one chat with the product reviews editor later, and my butt's planted on the mighty comfy Urbana.
I live in Shanghai, where cycling is a way of life, and I'm Italian, so cycling is in my blood. My background is mostly in mountain biking, so I'm used to fat tires and fat frames. But not, I'll admit, on a commuter bike.
The Urbana is as beefy and sturdy as a football player. It's got a step-through frame and lacks a horizontal top tube, à la "a girl's bike" – friendlier to the women of yesteryear who rode bikes in their long and ample skirts. The lack of rigidity that comes with this age-old design is mitigated here. The big tubes and quality welds keep the ride steady and comfortable. At the bottom of the "U" shape are two reinforcement plates. They're welded to the sides of the tubes where they act to reduce stress on the frame and stiffen things up around the bottom bracket.
The Urbana is spec'd for year-round versatility: disc brakes, fender eyelets, custom-made fat tires, a rear rack for panniers or cargo baskets, and a low-maintenance and clean Gates belt drive attached to a Shimano Nexus 8-speed internally geared hub. Even with all the hardware, it doesn't lose that je ne sais quoi, that (dare I say European?) grace that makes it look OK even when the rider is a gentle, middle-aged worker bee.
To put it another way, even with the beefiness, the Urbana is not the most masculine bike around. But even if the design doesn't scream "kick ass," the ride quality is still excellent. The low-pressure, 2.6-inch semi-slick Sidewalk "Nid de poule" tires digest knee-deep potholes, torn-up bike lanes, construction zones and curbs without worry. They also have some extra reinforcement, with an anti-flat layer under the tread and two layers of rubber around the sidewalls. These are custom tires, and every Urbana ships with them.
Something about the bike compels people to ask, "And how much would this cost?" The usual answer, upon hearing that it sports a hefty $1,800 price tag, is: "Woah! That thing?" We're conditioned to think of fancy racing bikes costing that much, but not commuters. Still, it's unfair to dismiss the Urbana on pricing. It's not a toy; it's a quality ride, and quality isn't cheap.
As the doorman in my building said: "It doesn't look fast." And it doesn't, I'll give him that. Much like a longboard or a low rider, it's built for comfort, cruising and coasting, not for moving you between here and there as fast as possible.
The vertical riding position (especially for yours truly, whose small frame had me positioning the seat post only a tiny bit out of the seat tube) doesn't help in the speed department. You catch wind like a spinnaker. But the weight of the frame and the mass of the wheels affords one very pleasant consequence: lots of momentum.