More than one of the competitors in Eindhoven pointed out that there is no one most practical vehicle. If, like Chairman Mike, your journey to work is mainly outside urban areas, or if you are fortunate enough to live somewhere well provided with cycle paths - Holland, Germany, Milton Keynes, etc. - then a faired trike is fine. But they have their downside too; trikes and traffic do not a happy mixture make, and for the average urban flat-dweller, storage is always going to be a problem. It is physically impossible to fit a faired Speedy into my current abode, and I still have painful memories of getting an unfaired one into my former first floor dwelling; the only way to do it was to hold it high above one's head and use the stairs to the back door, then stand it on its back wheel to get it inside, then spend ten minutes scrubbing off the chain marks which made one look as though one had recently escaped from the custody of a particularly nasty secret police force. Faired bikes, on the other hand, tend to fall over in the sort of weather where a fairing is required, although if your name is gNick Green, this doesn't seem to matter over much. Monocoque machines don't give you the option of having an unfaired vehicle for cruising on nice sunny days. And so on.

For these reasons (and others), my usual mode of transport is a partially-faired bike; the nose cone doesn't make it noticeably less wieldy in traffic, while the tail box is capable of holding all the goods and chattels required for the seventeen mile daily round trip, and it nestles happily in very little more space than either of my other bikes (unlike Chairman Mike, I'm not convinced that it's necessary to own a minimum of six "bicycles"...). In my view, a practical vehicle is one you just use, without having to think about it.

Judging the relative merits of vehicles for anything other than pure speed is always going to present problems. The object of the exercise is simply to find a "better bicycle"; a machine which scores over the conventional device in some way. And, let's face it, the standard diamond frame bicycle is an extremely versatile and practical contraption. Its drawbacks are basically that it's slow in comparison with the better class of recumbent, bicycle saddles are frequently not as comfortable as one's posterior would like, and it lets the weather in. So to improve on it, you need a machine which is faster, or more comfortable, or more weatherproof, or ideally some combination of these attributes. A practical machine must, of necessity, be a compromise; not even Pat Kinch is likely to nip down to the chippy in the Bean. But how do you quantify such attributes?

Possibly the best set of criteria yet seen in captivity are those devised in the mid-Eighties by Dennis Taves, and used in one form or another for several competitions (I don't propose to repeat them here, as they take up about five pages...) The one thing which is certain is that you cannot have a sensible practical vehicle competition without some sort of driving test, a feature conspicuously lacking in the 365-Dagen Fiets competition. It is unrealistic to expect anyone to judge the qualities of a machine in areas such as handling, ability in traffic, etc., without having seen it in action anywhere except around a wide and flat oval. Martin Staubach, whose own machine missed the 35 km/h cut-off by about two hundred yards, reported that he had ridden the Alleweder and had found it unable to perform a U-turn in the road. The front wheels cannot be reached from inside the shell... In addition, an anonymous Dutchman was heard to say that after spending half an hour riding it, you needed to lie down for an hour due to the nature of its seat. This is not meant as a slag-off of the Alleweder, but is merely intended to point out the absurd nature of the judging in this particular competition. Even something relatively artificial, like the Geschickligkeitsfahren (I love that word!) in last year's European Championships would have been better than nothing; there was certainly no shortage of space around the university campus in which to set out a few cones. Expecting someone to assess the qualities of a machine merely by looking at it from a range of ten feet is not a realistic way of doing it, and I have to agree with Mike that the Eindhoven competition seemed designed more to publicise its sponsors than to genuinely find a better bicycle. Which is a pity, as the degree of effort which had gone into the organisation of this event could have produced a truly memorable event.