Inside Vancouver
West Coasting
By Bruce Grierson published Oct 1, 2008
Additional Images click to enlarge
As congestion, gas prices, and limited parking make city driving more and more aggravating, this $10,000 tricycle—essentially, a pedal-powered car—starts to look like a smart idea.
The art photographer Alan Hoffman, who graduated from Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1998, developed a signature style that made his big Cibachrome prints instantly recognizable. With a large-format camera, he composed photographs with a tiny depth of field, which made the crisply focussed subjects in the very centre of the blur (a tractor, say, or a neon sign) look like train-set miniatures. The effect is somehow both nostalgically soothing and portentous of some postapocalyptic future. Hoffman still uses the technique in his gallery work. And so does everybody else now, it seems.
Hoffman is ahead of his time in a lot of ways. That much is clear if you happen to spy him commuting from his home in East Vancouver to his day job downtown at the Hostelling International headquarters on Burnaby Street. Hoffman drives the first production-model velomobile in Vancouver. A velomobile is officially considered a kind of bicycle. Technically, it’s a tricycle. But effectively, it’s a little pedal-powered car. The driver sits recumbent inside a sleek podlike shell about as long as a Prius. Hoffman’s model is called a Waw (pronounced “wow”), a play on the name of its Belgian designer, who created it as part of his master’s thesis at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
“ Frederik [Van De Walle] kind of designed it for himself,” Hoffman said one Friday morning recently. “He wanted it to do straight fast and to turn fast, and it does those things.” The Waw cruises comfortably at up to 40 kph, and because it can avoid gridlock by plying the bike lanes, it gets Hoffman to work as quickly as he could get there by car. (To buy it, Hoffman sold his beloved motorcycle.) Hoffman’s Waw has a BionX electric motor that kicks in to help him out on hills. “The Dutch”—world leaders in velomobiles—“think it’s a bit of blasphemy for me to put an electric assist in there,” Hoffman said, “but you know, there aren’t a lot of hills in the Netherlands.”
