In promoting cycling for transportation worldwide most of the discussion and action tends to focus on getting adults on bikes, particularly for that very American concept of “commuting” a considerable distance from home to work. Here in the Netherlands cycling for transportation just means generally getting around by bicycle. It’s mostly short distances since people tend to live much closer to work or school. Few would consider cycling greater distances unless it’s just for fun; Urbanites would instead take a train and country folk would most likely drive.
Here cyclists are mostly created from birth, both by example and by teaching kids to ride bikes at a very young age. Below is our story of our son P1 who now at the tender age of 2 1/2 is quite comfortable on a real pedal bike without “training wheels”. With a sample of one it’s certainly not scientifically proven but friends and customers have also had success with the same methods. So without further ado, here’s a timeline of P1′s development as a cyclist (so far). Please note that not all of the pictures show P1 at the age the activity actually begun: (more…)
There are few things more fun than cycling with your kids, especially when they’re in front of you so you can talk as you ride. A baby giggles, gurgles and squeals at all of the sights and probably the dynamics of cycling as well. With a toddler the communication is obviously more intellectually stimulating. P1 (2.5 yrs old): “Papa, papa… Taxi, blue Land Rover jeep winch, two motorcycle! Thaaaat’s funny. No helmet racing bicycle! Playground! Slide. Go to plaaaayyyyy ground!!! Plaaaaaayyyyy ground!!!!” Still, nowhere is P1 more motivated to articulate complete concepts than on the bike. I expect the same will be true for P2, except probably with girl topics instead of our current mini gearhead talk. (more…)
Long time customer Eddy sent this pic of himself and his kids along. Shall we count the “That’s gotta be Amsterdam” elements?…
1. Workcycles Fr8 Crossframe with Massive Rack front carrier (150kg load capacity). The bike is one of two hot-dip galvanized examples in existence. It was such a pain in the ass to make that it’ll probably also be the last.
2. Child on saddle behind the handlebar with footrests on the downtube. Kids absolutely LOVE sitting here and parents enjoy being able to talk while cycling. The kids just have to be mature enough to stay put, awake and keep their feet on the pegs.
3. Giant lock: 10mm hardened steel chain with disk-type Abus lock (hanging from cross point of the top tubes). Virtually impenetrable unless the thief is bold enough to make a lot of noise and sparks.
4. Baby on the belly. Is it safe? That’s debatable but cycling is, in any case, very safe and one cycles very carefully with a baby like this. This setup is certainly better than carrying the baby with any bike other than a Bakfiets Cargobike with a Maxi-Cosi installed (Eddy’s wife’s bike). See my research on the topic: Carrying a Newborn on a Bike
5. Rider making a Fr8 Crossframe look small. It’s a big truck of a bike meaning that Eddy is a Dutch sized guy.
6. Teddy bear on the best seat in the house.
Perhaps most noteworthy is that this image will hardly turn heads here. Watch parents picking their kids up from an elementary school and you’ll see 20 variations on this theme within five minutes, and not a car in sight.
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.
I can’t argue that this helmet for toddlers to wear around the house (i.e. its not for cycling or other dangerous activities) makes sense and that the design is cute. But am I wrong for finding this level of safety consciousness disturbing? At least this one comes from the UK, proving that its not always the Americans leading the safety charge.
