I periodically see fellow bloggers denigrating the “lycra crowd” with the basic idea that recreational cycling (at least if it involves wearing special clothes) is the antithesis of utilitarian cycling and just plain old bad. But why? Cycling is just plain wonderful, whether riding the bakfiets across town to bring the kids to school, or riding up a mountain with friends. All work and no play makes a dull boy! There has to be a place in the world for objects and activities without productive function. Otherwise there would be no art, sports, play, hobbies or fun… and that world would suck.
And many activities (productive or otherwise) are enhanced by donning specific gear. The doctor pulls on scrubs for surgery, the construction worker wears tough trousers with gear loops, knee pads and steel toed boots, and the fireman stays warm but not crispy in his Nomex coat and helmet. If you’re going to spend the day in the saddle you’ll probably be most comfortable in cycling clothes. Whether you’ll look good in them or not is another story.
I’m also perplexed by why people believe it’s impossible to be both a cyclist for transportation AND and cyclist for fun. I ride a no-nonsense utility bike every day to get around the city, and then (weather, work and family permitting) I get on one of my lovely sporty bikes and ride for a few hours. For much of my life that meant riding fast: training and competing in races. With the addition of Pascal our recreational cycling has generally become a family activity. Today we took maximal advantage of a Sunday with perfect cycling weather: We were out for 6 hours, though one doesn’t ride very fast while holding a sleeping baby in one arm, nor cover much distance with multiple cafe stops.
Anyhow, just ride your bike. Certainly do it for transportation, but don’t let the hair-shirt idealists stop you from going nowhere useful on your bike… in the tightest lycra sausage suit if you wish.
On our way to see friends for dinner at super yummy New King in the Zeedijik. Sun was directly into the camera, making things tricky. We’ll have to try again later.
Today was the most important day of the year for the Dutch: Queen’s Day. Everybody should experience this monumental block party slash mass garage sale at least once in their life. Nowhere else have I ever experienced so much humanity in such close quarters for so long over such a large part of a city. Three quarters of the city wears orange. Boats fill some canals bumper to bumper. People pack the most popular streets making even walking impossible, never mind bicycling or driving a car.
A few years ago Queen’s Day meant heavy-duty partying from the evening before (Queen’s Night) until at least late afternoon for us. Beer flows through the streets as water through the canals. We wandered the Jordaan (drunkenly) feeling half insider and half outsider.
But after eight or ten Queen’s Days the spectacle of the crowds and the partying becomes too familiar. More recently it’s become a quest to buy as much needed baby stuff as possible, as cheaply as possible. Kyoko researches the best neighborhoods to shop, and maps out our schedule… beginning at an ungodly early hour. Of course she knows what she’s doing and this year we scored a high-chair, lots of old wooden toys, modern toys, three buckets of baby-lego, cute clothes, two Bobike Mini child seats and more, all for maybe €100. The lightheated salesmanship and negotiations over how many cents will be paid for a toy make it all fun. Our partying was limited to sitting on our friends’ roof terrace afterward.
So why tell you about “Koninginnedag”? Well, because the bakfietsen are instrumental. All of the WorkCycles and MacBike rental bakfietsen get reserved months in advance by people and organizations planning to sell their goods or put on a show.
We and many others carry our new possessions home by bike too. It’s pretty much the only practical way to do so considering you can’t get a car within kilometers of the busy areas. Cycling might sometimes be slow or frustrating but you can usually find a quieter street to ride along or at least walk the bike through the crowd for a couple blocks. This year we took Kyoko’s Bakfiets Cargobike and a WorkCycles shop errand bike with two 60cm x 40cm plastic bins.
On a more somber note there was an attempted attack on the Royal Family, who was in Apeldoorn for the event. Some guy sped his Suzuki Swift (a small car) through the barriers in an attempt to hit the open bus the Royal Family rode in during the procession. He missed the bus but hit a number of bystanders. Some five people were killed and about a dozen wounded. The Dutch Royal Family has always travelled with minimal security and has never previously had a seriously threatening situation. Similarly the Dutch ministers are known for riding bikes around like normal people The press is speculating that this era of innocence has just ended.
Though I don’t really enjoy traveling by plane, Kyoko and I always note how wonderful it is to return to Schiphol Airport, far and away the best airport we know. It’s attractive, well marked and human in scale. There’s interesting art, pleasant lounges and acceptable restaurants. There are seemingly never lines or confusion and our luggage is usually on the baggage claim conveyor within moments of arriving. A few meters walk and a spacious elevator downstairs and we’re on a train to Amsterdam Central where another few meters walk brings us to tram 13 which stops in front of our house: 30 minutes from terminal to home in the city center. Thanks Amsterdam. You rock.
We test the public transport systems everywhere we go, sometimes to save money and sometimes out of morbid curiosity. Getting from the airport in Washington DC to Manhattan would fall into the morbid category. What could have been a few hour drive turned into an expensive all day adventure of ad-hoc shuttle buses, waiting for hours in train stations, broken down trains and struggling to drag luggage though New York’s horribly outdated and inaccessible subway system.
During this trip we sampled San Francisco and New York (JFK) again, this time with 8 month old Pascal in his carriage. With Sky Trains finally linking both airports to metros and trains things have improved considerably. But then again improvement is always easy when beginning with nothing. Just a fistful of comments:
New York
The fit, unencumbered and intrepid urban warrior can pretty quickly get around most of New York City in this extensive but hopelessly inhumane system. The shameful condition of the stations and non-Manhattan trains I can accept but the inaccessibility of it all is a bad joke. Try getting around the boroughs as a visitor, with a baby and/or luggage and you’ll understand what I mean: terrible and often misleading signage, large elevation differences and generally no working elevator or even escalator, very narrow turnstiles and not always an attendant to open the gates…
New York: charge lots of money for parking and on all of the bridges and shove that money right into building cycling infrastructure, traffic calming and massively overhauling the subways. As a result fewer people will drive reducing the costs of road maintenance, and subway ridership will increase massively increasing revenues.
San Francisco
The shiny new Air Train here connects directly to BART which goes right to the city. So far we’re in Euro performance territory here. But then it somehow just ends… before we’ve even really gotten into the city. That great BART metro runs along the southern edge of the city and then from there it’s just a ragtag collection of buses and Munis to serve the city. We actually walked up the hill to our hotel in Nob Hill along the bus line on late weekday afternoon. After 30 minutes pushing a baby carriage, towing a suitcase and wearing backpacks we arrived at the hotel… not a single bus had passed us, nor did one go by while we checked in.
SF: You’ve a lovely city but it’s terrible to get around. Charge lots of money for parking, institute some form of congesting pricing and put tolls on the bridges. Use the money to build a public transport system that actually goes through the city. Much of SF is lightly trafficked and/or too hilly for practical cycling so building cycling infrastructure should be relatively easy and cheap.
See? Everybody can be an urban planner as long as they needn’t show any results.
That’s me in New York in 1967. It looks like I’m about a year old here. I’m certainly not much older since I’m not wearing shoes, thus not walking yet.
My earliest memories are actually of riding around behind mom like this, pulling her underwear up, pointing things out and I assume babbling unintelligible things about them. Millions of these Raleigh Sports three-speed bikes were sold there in this period but few actually got ridden much. My mom was an exception; this bike got ridden quite a bit.
In high school my friend Tom and I used to collect these old English bikes. Every garage seemed to have a matching his and hers set collecting dust and we found more at church rummage sales, temple bazaars, police auctions etc etc. We had dozens of them in various states of completion. We did restorations and repairs for others, but also built some great hot-rods from these bikes: stripped of accessories with handlebars upside down we spent countless days violently racing through parks, woods and around golf courses in what we called “death rides”… We weren’t done until either one of the bikes couldn’t be bent back into rideable shape or somebody was in too much pain to continue. This sometimes resulted in 6 hour marathons but also a couple times in 5 minute sprints.
Check out the child seat on my mom’s Raleigh: It’s just bent steel with flat pads and no harness, head or foot protection whatsoever. I recall from much later that it folded up. What innocent times eh?
Not all use of our bakfiets is strictly for transportation. Sometimes we go for little tours with Pascal. One of our favorite routes winds from Amsterdam along the Amstel river to Oudekerk or maybe further to Abcoude, Nes or Uithoorn. We ride for an hour or so to a cafe, have lunch and coffee, change diapers and feed the baby, and then head back. We’re looking forward to better weather and more daylight in the spring and summer to do much longer family tours.
Last week it looked as if rain was impossible so we even went sans canopy for the first time since the fall. Of course it rained anyway but Pascal stayed pretty dry with my rain jacket wrapped over his Maxi Cosi and a Dirk van den Broek shopping bag over his legs. I got wet but as the Dutch say: “We’re not made of sugar”!
Lots of rowers train and sometimes compete on the Amstel, as seen here. Rowing is very popular in the Netherlands and I believe one of the handful of sports where the Dutch consistently rank amongst the world’s best.
Here’s Pascal suited up for a late winter ride in his giant, super-warm suit. The toys are really only needed when stopped since while cycling he’s either endlessly amused or sleeping. The blue bag behind him contains all the baby essentials.
A little background here: Many moms carry their babies around by bicycle here in the Netherlands. It’s pretty much a necessity when families live in densely packed cities where driving an automobile is neither practical, pleasant or affordable. At WorkCycles we’ve always recommended that this be done by putting the child in a Maxi-Cosi (by far the most popular make of car seat for infants), secured in the box of a bakfiets. We mostly do this in the Bakfiets.nl Cargobike but a number of others are good as well. We have a lot of experience with this system and haven’t seen any problems. Customers have even told us stories of accidents that their babies SLEPT through. In short a baby appears to be fairly safe in a protective car seat, in a sturdy wooden box, only several centimeters from the ground.
But not everybody wants to ride a Bakfiets and we customers regularly ask us to mount the Maxi Cosi on the front or rear carrier of a standard format bike… which we’ve steadfastly refused. Colleagues of ours do this regularly and quite a few customers have left one of our shops and gone straight to “brand X” where they’ve bought a bike equipped this way. We haven’t really helped the customer in such a case and we’ve lost a sale as well. I wanted to research the matter further.
Photo: Example of a bike equipped to carry a baby in a Maxi Cosi over the front wheel, NOT from WorkCycles.
Setting the Maxi-Cosi on a front carrier seemed like a BAD idea but perhaps acceptable with our new, super heavy duty and stable Fr8 bike. So I built a test rig and experimented with Pascal, then 2 mo old. Kyoko and I each rode the bike for an afternoon on a variety of (quiet) roads and smooth paths in Amsterdam.
One of our complaints with carrying babies on standard type bikes is that the parking stands are inadequate to hold the “load” stably. This is particularly true since the baby is set high over the front wheel while most bikes have their parking stand beneath the crank axle. That’s just not stable. The Fr8 is built differently: The rack is mounted with just enough clearance over the front tire and a very wide and stiff stand is integrated into the “Massive Rack”. This rack and stand are actually rated for over 150kg of cargo so a few kg of baby, Maxi-Cosi and the overbuilt system were not going to tax it. Test one passed with flying colors.
The system holding the Maxi-Cosi looks cheesy but it’s actually extremely solid and secure. I wouldn’t have put my 2 month old son in there otherwise! I bolted a board to the carrier and strong tie-down straps secure the Maxi-Cosi. In the bag below the Maxi Cosi are a stack of blankets and cushions for shock damping. It’s not visible in the photos but Pascal IS strapped into the Maxi Cosi under the blankets.
Riding the bike with baby aboard was obviously no problem, but wasn’t nearly as confidence inspiring as having the baby low in the wooden box of the bakfiets. There remained something unnerving about having the baby so high and in your sight line.
While riding we discovered the real problem with such a system: damping of large amplitude vibrations from the road surface… shaking the baby in other words. On perfectly smooth surfaces it was fine, but even the smallest irregularities in the road caused Pacal’s head to shake up and down. Even with the giant 54mm tires of the Fr8 so soft that they almost rolled on the rims, a small pothole or root pushing through the road caused unacceptable shaking.
Project over thus:
The shocks transmitted through the bike in such a format are simply unacceptable for a small baby, and short of an elaborate suspension system there is no way to counter it. An adequate suspension would require much more vertical distance between the baby carrier and front wheel and this setup was already as high as I would consider acceptable. Thus any further work in this direction would require a bike with a much smaller front wheel.
We maintain our position that carrying a baby on the front of a “normal” format bike is not acceptable and will not offer this until we’ve found a better approach.
A couple months ago I wrote about my own city bike, and noted that the lights have worked for years without fail. Well, yesterday I noticed that my headlamp bulb had gone dead. So I replaced it.
Keeping with the spirit of “practice what you preach” its to be expected that Kyoko and I would be transporting our son Pascal around in a Bakfiets Cargobike. We actually considered bringing him home from the hospital in a bakfiets but figured we’d just be tired and Kyoko would have no interest in sitting on or in a bike at that point. In fact we we’re totally wasted tired and definitely in no mood for cycling, even those two flat kilometers. It was one of the few times we’ve ever been happy to see a taxi in Amsterdam. Come to think of it it was also the only time Pascal has been in a car in his 11 week life.
After four weeks Kyoko was cycling again and Pascal seemed ready join his mom. I hadn’t even begun building our own bakfiets so I “borrowed” one of the WorkCycles rental/loaner bakfietsen for a few days and bolted in one of our Maxi-Cosi carriers. Its probably an exaggeration to say that Pascal “enjoyed” the ride, but he did sleep soundly the entire time; It certainly wasn’t bothersome for him.
We’ve had pretty terrible weather this fall and that’s good for keeping customers out of the shops. Thus I finally had time to build Kyoko’s own bakfiets. Perhaps I went a little over the top with the custom wheels with orange hubs (Sram i9 9-speed and Shimano dynamo hub with IM70 rollerbrake), orange painted fenders, lighting wiring run completely through the frame and rear carrier and a hundred other little, obsessive details. The Sram hub is in there just to get some experience with it. We generally avoid Sram gear hubs but Shimano’s are sometimes unavailable so its good to know the alternatives.
Just to note, you might wonder whether its significant that I chose an “old-model” Bakfiets Cargobike instead of the new Cargobike 2.0. The answer is simple: No, Kyoko just wanted an ivory white bike with colored parts and we had a Cargobike 1 and parts that fit the bill. In any case the differences between the two models aren’t enough to really care one way or the other.
Now at 11 weeks old Pascal sometimes stays awake while cycling, gazing back at mom or out (mostly upward) at the world. He seems very content tucked in his Maxi-Cosi, inside the canopy. The Maxi-Cosi snaps into his pram (a compact Bugaboo Bee, yes we’re very happy with it)… which easily fits into the rear of the Cargobike box. So Kyoko or I can bring the baby and a complete pram along in case the destination requires a fair amount of walking. Very handy!
The bike is parked in front of our house, where it will mostly live. We figure the very open location on the canal and next to a bridge makes it very visible from two streets and dozens of apartments. A thief would be very bold to fire up a disk grinder to cut through those hardened 10mm chains, though I doubt it’ll stop the local urchins from tagging the box.
You’ve probably never even thought about what bike the owner of WorkCycles rides every day. Fortunately that won’t stop me from showing you anyway. So here it is, in all its unwashed glory, plucked right from the street for its own, unglamourous photo shoot. I left the lock on the handlebars because I never ride without it. No gleaming, lustrous paint, polished anything, fancy parts, hydraulic anything or obsession about saddle care to be found here. Just to note: this Brooks B66 saddle was found on an abandoned bike and had probably sagged to death before I was even born. All the better – nobody will steal it.
My bike is an outdoor dog and that’s just a fact of life around the center of Amsterdam. Its about three years old and always sleeps chained to a lamppost right in front of our house. I ride it a couple times almost every day, for everything from commuting to riding to the station with a suitcase for traveling. There’s also a hitch that tows a nifty Carry Freedom trailer when the load gets too big. My wife Kyoko sometimes sits on the top tube, since I’ve no rear carrier… or at least she did until we had a baby a couple months ago. We have no car and I’m not much of a tram fan so the bike gets ridden in sun, rain, hail and snow. I enjoy almost all of it.
This bike gets cleaned only during repairs, which are extremely seldom. Nonetheless, it is smooth and silent and has never let me down: the lights have worked without a single failure, there are no gears to go out of adjustment, the brakes brake just fine, nothing has ever broken and probably never will. I can’t even recall ever having a puncture in this bike. Yes, I’m knocking wood right now. I pump the tires up either when I remember to, or the rims begin bottoming on the ground.
My bike has, however, been damaged for me, as described in this earlier post. Occasionally my bike falls or gets knocked over while parked. It has also inadvertently (and maybe not so accidentally) inflicted damage on some cars, as seen in the red streak of paint on the front carrier. That resulted in a car mirror flying though the air. Oops.
By no means is this my only bicycle but it is my only city bike and the one I ride 99% of the time. I love it but don’t obsess about it.
