The geek in question: Daniel Whitlow
Title & Group: SDE Intern, Microsoft’s Boston Concept Development Center

Where are you finishing up your degree?
I’m a rising junior at MIT working on a degree in Computer Science and Engineering.

So, what’s up with the unicycle commute? How long is your daily ride?
I live near the Cambridge office. It’s only about a five minute ride.

How fast can you go on it?
Typically I cruise at 15-20 mph. Assuming no unexpected bumps/pedestrians in the way, I could probably get a lot faster than that, but since I ride on the sidewalks I try to take it easy to avoid hitting anybody.

Why’s the wheel so huge?
Unlike bikes, most unicycles don’t have gears. Increasing the wheel size (the one I ride to work is a 36”) gives you more distance per revolution and thus more speed. Unfortunately, it comes at the cost of acceleration and agility. I can’t do half of the things I could do on one of my smaller wheels.

Ever had an accident?
Most unicycle falls leave the rider standing. However, if you’re not paying attention, sometimes one of your feet can fly off the pedal and get caught on it when it comes around a second time, keeping you from putting it under you to land on your feet. It’s happened to me a couple of times when I was practicing trick mounts and riding down stairs. Even from that, I’ve never been seriously injured—just some scratches from the pedals on my shins.

What kind of comments do you get during your commute?
The most common one is “Where’s the other wheel?” One of my favorite responses is to say “What? It was here a second ago…”, and then I look behind myself and promptly fall off. Some other people just laugh. I do kind of encourage it, though. One night when I was riding on a bridge, to mimic the bicyclists with a headlight on their handlebars, I took a light out of my pocket and just held it pointing ahead. The people I passed were a bit surprised when they saw past the glare.

Another fun thing to do is take a second unicycle with me (if I need to get it fixed or take it to a juggling club meeting) and push it in front of me as I ride, trying to pass it off as a bike.

Do you lock it up like a normal bike?
If I’m planning to be somewhere for more than half an hour or so, I usually bring a lock and put it with the bikes. If I’m not going to be long, I usually just take it into the building with me.

So, here’s the deal-breaker question: Why a unicycle? Why not just a bike?
A unicycle is pretty easy to carry around when I’m not in an appropriate place to ride—in buildings, up staircases, etc. And of course I’d be lying if I said I didn’t do it for fun, too.

Daniel unicycles off into the sunset