*ORIGAMI BIke* From Zero to Suitcase in under 6 seconds

Perhaps like too many new things these days, the Tikit bicycle got its first publicity from a video posted on YouTube. In it, a young man rides up to a curb on a small-wheeled bike. He dismounts, and with what looks like one simple motion, the bicycle collapses into a package the size of a folding chair.

"A bike is something that should be with you all the time," said Hanz Scholz, co-founder and lead designer at Green Gear Cycling, a specialty manufacturing company in Eugene, Ore. "It ought to be something you can carry around, and you shouldn't get dirty using it."

The Tikit's light weight and rapid folding ability target the biggest problem with integrating bicycles into intermodal transportation: what to do with the bike when you have to transfer onto a bus, train, or airplane. Indeed, a folded Tikit can even be used as a two-wheel grocery cart.

It may look a little funny, but this $900 bike is designed to go places an old-fashioned 3-speed cannot.

Scholz started the company with his brother back in 1992 to meet the demand for high-end bicycle frames in Eugene, a town noted for its large cycling community. The company makes tandem bikes (with two or three seats), but the main product has been folding bicycles-ranging from commuter bikes to purpose-built models for triathletes. Over time, the shop has turned into a small-scale manufacturing plant with more than 25 employees.

But while having success at building specialty bicycles, Scholz wanted to go a step further and design a bike with a folding mechanism that was simple, intuitive, and fast.

"A folding bike should flip out like a beach towel," Scholz said. "You flip it out and you roll it up. We all did that as kids when we went to the swimming pool. You don't have to open a clasp or turn a key. You don't have to put it in a case. You flip it out and there it is."

The key to the design of the Tikit is this latch under the saddle. As long as a rider is on the seat, the bike can't fold up.

Compared to a car, of course, a standard bicycle is lightweight and compact. But engineers have been designing fold-up bicycles for decades-folding bikes were even used by infantrymen in World War I-because cyclists have a very different relationship with their vehicles than motorists do. For instance, many cyclists store their bikes in their house or apartment. And, since long-distance travel is arduous on a bicycle (a motorist's leisurely driv-ing vacation is a cyclist's Tour de France), taking a bike onto a bus or train greatly increases its utility.

But up to now, folding bikes haven't lived up to their potential. For one thing, designing a bike light enough to carry around risks making it too flimsy to support a rider. Another problem lies in the mechanisms that lock the expanded frame in place: The pins and quick-releases that secure the frame have to be easy to undo, but keep the bike from feeling as if it's going to shake apart during a ride.

While Scholz has been making conventional folding bikes under the Bike Friday label for some time, it took more than a decade to complete the design of the Tikit. Designing a bike that can fold out like a beach towel required eliminating all the pins and quick releases. "Most folding bikes have at least two," Scholz said. But that meant keeping the entire frame rigid by using some other easy-to-disengage mechanism.

"The first thing I asked was, 'What movement would unlatch everything?'" Scholz said. "And what could you do while riding that would keep that movement from happening?" Eventually, Scholz hit upon an elegant solution-using the weight of the rider as the means of keeping the bike together.

It takes just a couple of quick movements and about six seconds to fold the Tikit into a compact, easy-to-stow form.

A small latch is disengaged with a cable release activated at the handlebar. "Gravity does most of the work," Scholz said. "It does have a latch, but it's not a strong one, and you can undo it by pushing the saddle forward. But as long as there is weight on the pedals, you can't push the saddle forward. It's fail-safe."

Everything else in the design centered on that core premise. For example, to minimize the tangle of parts when the bike was folded, the latch release, brake, and gearshift cables were run through the steering tube. And the pieces lock together when folded, although in a similar easy-to-undo manner.

A few months after the introduction of the Tikit, Scholz said his company was building five or six every day. (The cool, damp spring on the West Coast has hurt sales, he said.) The Tikit, like all Bike Friday vehicles, is hand assembled, and labor adds quite a bit to the cost. The bikes run over $900 apiece.

"It's a complicated bike," Scholz said, "and we build them in the United States. That puts us at the top end of the market."