Anchorage Daily News

If a bicycle and a Cessna had a love child, it would look like the gawker magnet Andy Sorensen drives around town.

People pull alongside him at stop lights, roll down their windows and shout, "What the heck is it?"

For starters, it's small. So small, Hummer drivers could flick it off their windshields.

Sorensen, or Rocket Man as he's been called, doesn't mind the questions.

"You got an engine in that thing?"

"You're looking at him," he says.

"You got a heater in that thing?"

"You're looking at him."

The official term is "velomobile." These human-powered vehicles have been around for decades but are mostly a northern European thing. As far as Sorensen knows, he's got the only one in Alaska.

His model is a Leitra, hand-crafted by a Danish physicist who gave up cars in 1980 and has put more than 160,000 miles on his own. It's basically a 28-gear recumbent bicycle with an aerodynamic cowling.

"It's an ingenious little machine," Sorensen says. "It's a neat combination of high tech and low tech -- high tech where it needs to be, and low tech where it can be."

He steers it with dual joysticks, kind of like a fighter pilot. Its ventilation system is engineered so that, once it's moving, the windshield won't fog up. It's got leaf-spring suspension, single-lever dual hydraulic brakes.

On flat ground he can cruise down the road at 15-20 miles an hour. Sometimes 25.

As opposed to a traditional, hunch-over-the-handlebars bicycle, recumbents are ridden in a sort of La-Z-Boy recliner position with legs extended forward to reach the pedals. "Lawn chairs on wheels," as Sorensen calls them. The cowling on his Leitra amounts to a streamlined, weatherproof cockpit.

Most velomobile models are "head out," meaning the head pokes out of the top as if riders are sporting a torpedo suit. Sorensen went for the "head in" kind.

"They're awfully well suited to a climate like this," he says. "I ride the contraption all winter long." He's ridden it at 15 below with nothing more than a pile jacket.

His is a tricycle, and although that increases stability for winter driving, he still slides into trouble once in a while.

"You're not very far off the ground, so it's not like you hurt yourself," he said. "You just kind of flop into wet ice and slop, you curse and you keep going."

Anyone who thinks the velomobile is funny-looking can laugh all the way to the gas pump. And because it doesn't burn fossil fuels, it isn't coughing up fur balls of exhaust into Anchorage streets.

If it ever breaks down, it fits into the back of a mini van so will never need a tow truck. And it can be parked on city sidewalks.

Yes, Sorensen says, that's legal. It's street legal, too, with headlights, taillights, turn signals, a rear-view mirror, a horn and a hand-operated windshield wiper. Since it's human powered, he doesn't need a motor vehicle license and it doesn't need to be registered. Police haven't bothered him.

Sorensen, who works for Alyeska Pipeline Company, was living in Valdez when he started down the road to velomobiles. He liked regular bicycles well enough, but after an hour or two of riding his body didn't.

"You know, your wrists, hands, neck and shoulders, your butt -- all that stuff. If you're 20 years old, that's great. But after you get like 40 or something you begin to say, nuh-uh.

"So then I bought a recumbent bike and realized that if you got rid of all the ergonomic (problems), bike riding was fun for a long, long time. And now I have a whole garage full of them, like six or eight. I got so addicted I wanted to be able to do it in the winter time."

Before buying his Leitra, Sorensen created his own velomobile, building the cowling out of corrugated plastic. He rode it around Valdez for a year before getting his Leitra, then was transferred to Anchorage in 2007. His home-built velomobile had an electrical assist for a little extra oomph getting up a steep hill in Valdez. His Leitra doesn't have that feature.

"Going up hill, it's a grind, no question about that," he admits.

His commute to work now is short, about a mile. He also takes the velomobile to the gym, to the grocery store, to Costco, to Home Depot and other spots mostly around midtown. There's a storage compartment big enough for a couple sacks of groceries. For bigger loads, he hooks on a little trailer.

This is not about being carless. He has two, a Honda Odyssey mini van he uses to cart around his recumbents and other toys, and a Volkswagen Jetta turbo diesel that gets about 50 miles to the gallon.

He went to a lot of trouble to get his Leitra.

A New Jersey recumbent aficionado had posted a review of his own 2000 Leitra on the Internet, telling how he'd flown to Denmark to meet its creator, Carl Geog Rasmussen, and how he'd been able to fly home from Europe with it as checked baggage.

Sorensen dropped him an e-mail.

"I said, 'Hey, I'm thinking of doing the same thing. Got any pointers?' And he said, 'Funny you should e-mail me right now.'"

The guy was being transferred to Manhattan; his Leitra was for sale.

"The long and short of it," Sorensen said, "on the spur of the moment, right about this time of year, I bought a cheap ticket to Newark International."

On his return flight, when he showed up with his Leitra, the agents laughed at him.

"They said, 'You're not checking that thing.'"

Sorensen went home without it.

Since it weighed only about 65 pounds, a trucking company quoted him $600 to ship it. But that was before a shipping crate was build around it, making it more like 400 pounds and the cost jumped closer to $2,000.

In the end, he paid around $3,000, plus shipping, about half of what it cost new. It's been worth it.

"You know what's been one of the best things about this? Like, 99 out of 100 people are just thrilled by the thing. I sort of expected it would be like 50-50 or 60-40, that a bunch of people would be, 'Get out of the road, you crazy kook!'

"I can go months without having that happen. But I can't ride once across town without cell phone photos, people smiling and waving, thumbs up.

Environmentally, he says, it's the right thing to do.

"But top of the list? Fun. It's a fun toy,"

Find Debra McKinney online at adn.com/contact/mckinney

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