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.

Bas of www.transportfiets.net, (that’s trans-port-feets-poont-net for english speakers) turned me onto this super little video. It’s genuine film footage from a 1933 race in Bussum (near Amsterdam) on baker’s and butcher’s bikes. Back in those days most transport bikes had fixed wheels (“fixies” you young folk) and like all those modern-day urban hipsters on track bikes, these bikes had no brakes either. There’s a difference though: A transportfiets weighs an easy 50kg, and that’s before it was loaded down with 50kg of meat. The wheels alone weigh a good 10kg each. Can you say mo-men-tum?

I have a handful of old “transportfietsen” in various states of disrepair and disassembly. They’re glorious machines; Very simple but so solidly made that they put all other bicycles to shame. Riding them is a great sensation. It takes a while to get up to speed but once all that mass is rolling there’s no stopping it.

These bikes were employed by practically every baker, butcher, milkman and other business in the Netherlands from perhaps the 1920’s until perhaps the 1960’s, when cars and delivery vans became affordable for small businesses. Keep in mind that the Netherlands was quite a poor country through modern history until the 1960’s. The bikes were ridden by delivery kids, much like pizzas are now delivered by annoying kids on mopeds with boxes on the back.

Note also that the Dutch Transportfiets predates the similar format but rather esoteric and much lighter duty French “porteur” or “veloporteur” by decades. Transportfietsen were also made in quite large quantities which partially accounts for the remarkably large number still on the streets, considering that the last of them went out of production in the 1970’s. Of course the fact that they were quality built like tanks also helps.

Transportfietsen were made by hundreds of firms, small and large and most of them look essentially the same: double top tube, huge front carrier fixed to the handlebar and (large) front axle, generally no rear carrier or parking stand. Pre-WW2 examples all had 28 x 1 3/4 wheels and usually fixed wheels. Later both 28″ and 26″ wheels were used and most were made with a single-speed Fichtel & Sachs Torpedo coaster brake hub. Parts such as chains and sprockets, forks handlebars, cranks, pedals etc were all bigger and stronger than on normal bicycles. I have never seen an old transportfiets originally equipped with gears or a front brake.

Have a look around transportfiets.net for tons of examples, including a number of bikes in restoration and also lots of old archive photos and catalogues. Bikes like this will never come back so it’s great that some enthusiasts are keeping them alive as examples of the values of another era.

swing seat on kronan bike 1, originally uploaded by henry in a’dam.

This is just a bright green bike child seat, right? Look again. It’s a cheap and broken swing tied to a Kronan bike with the rope normally used to hang it from a a tree. I don’t think this baby seat is approved by any official bodies.

It is a good example of the relaxed attitudes about child transport and cycling in general in the Netherlands, particularly Amsterdam. Cycling is simply not regarded as a dangerous activity and for good reason: the statistics demonstrate that it isn’t.

Nonetheless, I’ll be taking somewhat more care than this with my own kids, thank you.

Note the use of an old mouse pad as a cushion.

Here’s a better view of the old swing rope used to “secure” the seat to the Kronan’s (flimsy, sheet metal) rear carrier.

These statistics about cycling just in from the Dutch RAI, “branch organization for mobility”…

There are 19.1 million two-wheelers in the Netherlands (and 16.4 million people). This includes 634,000 motorcycles and about 500,000 mopeds and scooters, thus about 18,000,000 bicycles. Of course could pretty much guess this just by looking at the bicycle covered streets of each town. Its obvious there are about as many bikes as people, and they’re mostly city/utility bikes that live outdoors.

The number of motorcycles has doubled since 1998. Having (also) ridden a motorcycle for many years I can take some guesses about the significance of this: The motorcycle has steadily lost its bad-boy image, becoming more accepted and mainstream. As traffic and parking worsen the motorcycle (like the bicycle) becomes a suitable alternative to driving a car.

The Dutch rode rode their two-wheelers a total of 19 billion kilometers, about 3 billion more than in 1998. That’s approximately 1200 kilometers per resident of all ages, shapes and sizes per year. Considering the population too young or otherwise unable to cycle, that’s an awful lot of kilometers per person. One could argue that the inclusion of motorcycles skews the statistics, but then there are only 1/30th as many motorcycles as bicycles.

Elsewhere the bicycle usage stats are separated. Here we see that the Dutch cycle, on average, 909km per year, which translates to 2.48km per head, per day. This has largely held steady since 1991, the earliest year shown in the chart. Thus, a definitive NO to the question posed in an earlier post “Are the Dutch replacing their bikes with cars”.

Below some more statistics I find interesting

Sales of new bicycles in the Netherlands in 2007 by type (x1000):
846____City bicycle
227____Child’s bike
141____Hybrid / trekking bike
89_____Electric bike
48_____Mountain bike
33_____Folding bike
14_____Racing bike
50_____Others
3______Unknown
1401___TOTAL

Average purchase price for a bicycle in the Netherlands in 2007:
€603____All bicycles including department stores
€709____Sold through bicycle shops

Length of bicycle paths and roads per province:
872_____Groningen
997_____Friesland
1183____Drenthe
1401____Overijssel
549_____Flevoland
2182____Gelderland
947_____Utrecht
2307____Noord-Holland (Amsterdam region)
2198____Zuid-Holland (Rotterdam, the Hague region)
680_____Zeeland
2793____Noord-Brabant
962_____Limburg
17071___TOTAL

If 17,000 km of nearly perfect bicycle paths and roads doesn’t sound so impressive then just look at a map of the Netherlands to see how small this country is.

Source: RAI vereniging. Read it for yourself here. In Dutch of course.

UPDATE September 2009: A new and very thorough study of the Dutch bicycle path network was recently completed. It was determined that the earlier figure of 17,000km was highly inaccurate. In fact it was determined by actually measuring the roads with modern electronics that it is approximately 29,000km. But if that isn’t incredible enough consider that that is only a measurement of the bicycle paths separated from auto traffic. Painted bike lanes, as most of the world regards as “bicycle infrastructure” were not even counted. If they did they’d basically have to include the entire Dutch road network.

STREET TALK!
Bicycle Planning in the Netherlands
Thursday Nov. 20, 7:00 – 9:00 pm
by Hans Voerknecht, International Coordinator of the Dutch Bicycle Council

At LivableStreets, 100 Sidney Street, Central Square, Cambridge, MA, USA

Free and open to the public, donation suggested beer/sodas provided compliments of Harpoon Brewery! Note: FREE BEER!

Simply copied from the Livable Streets site to promote their event, which vaguely promotes my goal of promoting utility cycling, Dutch style.

Learn about bicycle planning in the Netherlands from the International Coordinator of the Dutch Bicycle Council (Fietsberaad).

The Dutch rely ever more on the humble bike for transport as pollution concerns and high petrol prices give new impetus to traditional pedal power in the only country with more bicycles than people. The Netherlands, home to just over 16.3 million people, actually boasts some 18 million bicycles– 1.1 bikes per person.

Not even the wet climate seems able to put a spoke in the wheels of the Dutch, who weave through city traffic shrouded in plastic on rainy days, transporting anything from pets and children to groceries, musical instruments and plants on their bikes. Many a parent can be seen negotiating traffic with a child secured to each end of a bicycle with shopping bags and even a briefcase secured to the sides.

This event is cosponsored by LivableStreets Alliance and MassBike. Many thanks to Anne Lusk and the Harvard School of Public Health for bringing Hans to Boston.

I hope some Boston area WorkCycles / Azor / Bakfiets/ Dutch bike riders will attend and proudly show off their fine machines! I’d love to hear how it went. Thanks!

Curious about what cycling is like in the Netherlands? Here’s a beautiful and informative series of reports by a Canadian couple who are presently doing a relaxed two week cycle tour in the Netherlands… in normal clothes, on WorkCycles city bikes. Honestly I’m a quite jealous as I sit here taking a a break from the quarterly bookkeeping.

You can follow the progress of Les and Helen’s Dutch cycle tour here.

Enjoy your trip guys!

North American cyclists are busy envying the Dutch love and use of bicycles for transportation but is everything so rosy in the Netherlands? Jonathan Maus of Bike Portland recently posted an piece about Loek Hesemans, the Senior Policy Officer at the Netherlands’ Ministry of Health, Welfare and Sport. Hesemans recently visited Portland, OR and Vancouver, BC with the goals of learning how policymakers there promote and plan for bike use, and examining the role bike culture plays (or doesn’t) in increasing ridership.

For our Dutch and Danish readers “bike culture” seems to be when people who ride bikes identify as “cyclists” (or even better specific types of cyclists), hanging out together, writing about bikes/cycling, custom-building and taking pictures of their rides, and generally being “into” bikes and cycling. Ironically “bike culture” is a phenomenon of a place where few people cycle. In a place like the Netherlands where most people cycle, the machine and activity are generally regarded with the same degree of interest and reverence as washing machines. Either Cycleliciousness or Copenhagen Cycle Chic had a nice piece on cycling culture from a Danish perspective. I just can’t find it right now.

Here is a good summary of Heseman’s research in Pricetags.

Hesemans observations largely seem very insightful and some of the photos and examples are priceless. However there is one key “statistic” mentioned that doesn’t seem correct. According to Maus, “Hesemans estimates that country-wide, the number of people that ride is less than 30% — and he says, due to several factors, those numbers are trending downward.” There are some elements of truth here, but I don’t buy it entirely.

I’m not going to provide thorough statistics to back up my statements but what I’ve read and seen paints a different picture:

(more…)

When I visit suppliers and customers outside of Amsterdam I generally take the folding bike in the train. On the Amsterdam end its just a couple kilometers to Central Station. But some of my usual destinations (such as Nijland Products in Heeten) mean 10-15km rides through some lovely countryside. The combination of working in the train, a business meeting and relaxing bike rides through farmland makes for a great, varied day.

The travel time this way is somewhat longer than driving in perfect conditions but the traffic in the Netherlands is awful so my train/bike ride is, in practice, quite a bit faster. There are still plenty of cars on the roads here but apparently I’m not the only one who who prefers the bike/train combination. 

I snapped the above picture in a “stoptrein” (local train) last week. There are six folding bikes visible in this little space, but also others I couldn’t get into the frame. Just for the record, I spot in this shot: Brompton, BuzzBike (Brompton rip-off), DaHon, Riese und Muller and a few generics.

My own folder is a very hot-rodded DaHon Helios – lower right in the photo. It doesn’t fold really compactly or roll along on its own wheels like a Brompton, but its really light and rides beautifully. If it were my daily rider and had to be frequently folded/carried I’d opt for a very light, trick Brompton… we don’t sell Bromptons but I love them anyway.