Rob Forbes Plugs "Evolutionary" Public D 3-Speed Bicycle

[image error]

Photograph by Dan Saelinger

If you had asked Rob Forbes a few years ago to recommend a good city bike, he would have said, "Get a used bike from the 1960s." Today, Forbes, who founded furniture retailer Design Within Reach and now heads the design shop Studio Forbes, would reply: Buy mine.

Forbes's Public D is less revolutionary than evolutionary. U.S. bicycles are mostly based on racing and mountain bikes. But Forbes drew on Britain's 19th-century "double diamond," the ancestor of the...