I am sure that many of you will agree that the 2009 Tour de France has been a great one so far… I think the most exciting in recent years. I have been following the race coverage online every chance I get, so I haven’t been paying much attention to other types of bikes this week. Tips have been pouring in though, by email and on Twitter, so I want to quickly pass along a few interesting links that have nothing to do with racing.

The bike pictured here is the limited edition “Dutch Master” from the people at Core77 Design Magazine & Resource. As they pointed out in a blog post, “The Dutch Master is based on the beloved Worksman cruiser frame—a workhorse foundation used throughout the New York delivery community, and manufactured in Queens, New York for over 110 years.” The 25 bikes will be built by KT Higgins, an ex messenger and the current owner of Bushwick Bike Shop in Brooklyn. You can meet the designers of the Dutch Master at the SoHo Apple store tommorow, July 11th, from 3 to 4 pm, so stop by and check it out if you are in New York.

I mentioned the ZWEISTIL upright/ recumbent design briefly in a post after seeing it on Coroflot. SolidSmack, a 3D CAD site, recently posted an interesting article in which Stefan Wallmann, who designed the bike along with Daniel Knüpfer, explains the process that they went through to create a working prototype.

A reader, Tom Martin, let me know about these limited edition colored saddles from Brooks. It has been a long time since I have owned a Brooks saddle, but these look pretty nice.

Tom also pointed me to this article about the branding and graphic design behind Nice Ride, Minneapolis’ municipal bike-sharing program.

Lenart Pušnik is a design student with a new concept for an indoor recumbent exercise bike. You can see a rendering of his design here.

It shouldn’t really come as a surprise that clothing and accessories retailer Urban Outfitters has now started selling fixies. On the “Urban Outfitters Bike Shop” site, you can pick a frame size, choose custom colors for nine different parts, and expect to see your new $399 fixie…um, make that singlespeed… in about 7 days. I found out about this via the Refinery 29 Pipeline blog, but I immediately clicked over to Bike Snob NYC to see if he had mentioned it yet. Sure enough…read his take here.

Finally, I will mention a pair of pedal powered taxi links that I found via Twitter. @Tucson_Cowgirl mentioned a post about colorful bicycle taxis in Yokohama, Japan. @Gunderhaegg replied that Stockholm, Sweden also has similar taxis in use. Here in the US, we have pedicabs in many cities, but most of them are open top models. I wonder about the driver/rider visibility on these enclosed designs.

OK, that is enough for now. It is back to looking at Tour bikes for me…so you can expect more talk about fast bikes next week.