I came across the race through a friend of mine, who mentioned it online (where else). So word of mouth. Didn’t know beforehand it was a sponsored charity event, but that luckily that didn’t ‘spoil’ the fun.

groet!
Marc

Of course such a special two wheeler must be well designed and constructed, and after a number of years of being spoiled with the excellent Bakfiets Cargobike the copies are adding up quickly. Thus far all of the Cargobike copies have either missed the important parts or just been too cheaply made to work properly.

WorkCycles once sold more trikes than bikes for child transport. But once people began to accept the Bakfiets Cargobike and see them on the streets the ratio gradually tipped in favor of the Cargobike. We also saw that our customers were generally happiest with their Cargobikes. They came back for service, new accessories and fresh tires. Their friends and neighbors also came to us to buy more bikes. The trikes we sold were often never seen again or they returned for “non-use” related repairs, sometimes covered in spider webs and with moss in the box. What a shame to spend €2000 on trikes and then not use it regularly.

Groeten,
Henry

Just out of curiosity I never heard anything about that event. How did you come across it?

Groeten,
Henry

This respect to the tipping issue, we only tried our two year old in it, and he wasn’t heavy enough for it to be an issue. Still, despite my wife and I being attracted to the look of trikes, we went for a 2-wheeler after trying a couple out simply because we felt the handling of the Kangaroo didn’t offer much in the way of cycling fun. To me, it felt like there was positive feedback in the steering, such that it could jackknife at speed. I did get it up on two wheels (for research purposes, honest), and it could be brought back down quite easily, but there were moments, even at quite low speed, where awkward camber changes made it difficult to keep it on the cyclepath.

I posted this on my blog and a long-term Kangaroo-owner pointed out that the steering problems could have been a function of a poorly adjusted steering damper. I don’t know. However, it occurs to me that if the pivot could be sufficiently damped and not make it impossible to steer, there may be a sweetspot whereby the damper could stop the possibility of the frame swinging to one side in the event of the trike tipping. What is worth pointing out is that the Kangaroo’s pivot works to cause the frame (and rider) to lean into a turn. I suspect that without damping, this would increase the likelihood that frame would swing to one side, and as you point out, it could be a serious concern if traffic was passing.

http://amsterdamize.blogspot.com/2008/05/mama-bakfiets-race.html

cheers