Bikes designed to haul freight or passengers have been around for a long time. Picture the massive rickshaw or those bikes you see pulling a brightly colored trailer, two kids nestled in the back, helmets bobbing. It's not exactly handy, however, to pull a trailer behind your bike, and not many of us are about to dump our nimble bicycle for a heaving rickshaw.

Enter the sport utility bicycle, a long bike nearly as dexterous as a conventional bike but with a remarkable capacity for cargo, whether that means lots of stuff or people. I recently turned my mountain bike (a Specialized Rock Hopper) into an SUB with a frame extension called the FreeRadical ($490), made by Xtracycle, a small, quirky and ingenious company based in Oakland, Calif.
—Mark Benjamin, "My family car is an SUB and I love it," Salon.com, July 24, 2008

Lee Cordner's "Green pop quiz" (Marin Voice, Dec. 30) wasn't very green. I took his test and found that like the rest of Americans, he assumes everyone owns and drives a car. He gave no points for those of us who ride our bicycles everyday.

His assumption leads him to ask "how new is your car?" I don't own one. How many points do I get? Then because of his same assumption, he asks, "What is your car's gas mileage?" He left me no room to boast about my bike's mileage and no room for me to get points.

I own two bikes, a SUB (sport utility bike) and one I call my Ferrari. Any points for owning and riding two bikes?
—Jim Geraghty, "Quiz wasn't green enough" (letter), Marin Independent Journal, January 3, 2008

What's next? Expect to see a push in pricey but popular Y-frame mountain bikes (using, makers claim, Stealth-bomber technology) from industry leader Trek Bicycle Corp. Also from Trek's Gary Fisher brand (he was a mountain-bike pioneer) will come an array of newly designed city bikes — dubbed "sport utility bikes," or SUB, for extra cache.
—Patrick M. Reilly, "Mountain Bikes Try for the Top, Again," The Wall Street Journal, August 23, 1996