A NEW BOOK PROFILES THE BIKE MAKERS WHO ARE CREATING SOME OF THE MOST DROOL-INDUCING AND INNOVATIVE RIDES AROUND. New York City’s soon-to-be-launched bike-sharing program has met with Big Apple-size skepticism. It’s too dangerous for a city with so little cycling infrastructure, detractors cry. The bike stations are too ugly (and a blight on historic neighborhoods), and the bikes themselves are crass advertisements for their corporate underwriter, Citibank. Regardless of whether those criticisms are fair, the program does reveal the fact that bike culture--the lifestyle most often associated with the Netherlands and, on this side of the pond, Portland, Oregon--is riding into the mainstream. New York may not become Amsterdam anytime soon. But even here, interest has fueled daring experiments in bike construction and fashion. Supported by technological advances, designers are sculpting novel materials (wood, bamboo, carbon fiber, and even cardboard ) into breathtakingly novel