As a bicyclist in Boston, it’s easy to feel at a disadvantage in a city filled with reckless drivers. For one, lacking size and a motor leaves you constantly fighting the losing battle for real estate on the right shoulder. But it’s also more difficult to have a voice when you’re limited to just two wheels. Car horns, especially in Boston, are used liberally, and greatly overpower dinky bicycle horns.
There’s now an alternative for those bikers who feel they lack volume, and it’s all thanks to Somerville’s Jonathan Lansey, who invented the Loud Bicycle Horn. Two years ago, Lansey, a mechanical engineer and former Boston University student, launched a Kickstarter for his product — a large device that straps to the front of bicycles and allows riders to emit a honk that’s powered up to car-level volumes. He managed to raise more than $52,000 for the project, a sum that far surpassed his goal of $43,000.
Almost two years later, after undergoing some design tweaks and facing production struggles, the first shipment of these horns were sent out early last month. Thanks to our pal Henry Santoro of RadioBDC, who was a backer of the project, we got to give the Loud Bicycle Horn a test drive.
Now, clearly the horn is meant for bicycles, and specifically for bicyclists to be able to make their presence known to drivers (definitely not for road rage). Unfortunately, we didn’t have a bike handy in the office, so we did the next best thing: snuck up on our dear friend Eric just to see if it worked. It worked.
Lansey is gearing up for a second round of production, hoping to deliver to new customers by March. If you missed round one, you can pre-order the horn on the company’s website. You may even have a new piece of gear for when biking season starts back up.
