It’s ironic that some humble, dirty parts such as a parking stand actually have far more influence on your cycling experience than a beautiful frame or fancy, name-brand components. A stable, smooth working parking stand enables you (for example) to safely load up the kids and groceries, plop the bike onto the ground and cycle away uneventfully… just how you want it to be. But few people pay attention to such mundane things in the showroom so this is exactly where most manufacturers save a few bucks or euros. WorkCycles isn’t “most manufacturers” because we actually ride our bikes every day, carry our kids on/in them, move our stock between two shops on them… and listen to our customers who do the same.

Finding decent parking stands has been one of our most vexing challenges. During our quest for the perfect parking stand we’ve tried dozens. Most are so crappy that they don’t even deserve mention: All those Hebie copies from Taiwan and China fit poorly and then either bend under the weight of a loaded bike, quickly get scarily sloppy and break, or seize up from corrosion. The more sophisticated folding stands from Humpert and Spanninga (Sparta) have also failed our durability tests miserably. The cast aluminium Pletschers are light and pretty but not strong enough for bikes with child seats and heavy bags.
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We arrived at work yesterday figuring that the sub-zero cold, wind and snow would keep most of the customers away, leaving us with time to work on some projects. The highest priority is reconfiguring our workshop after building a massive, floor-anchored, steel frame to hang our electric bike lifts from. It’s a great improvement but not entirely our own initiative. The lifts, you see, were bolted into the 150 or 200 year old wooden beams of our ceiling… and thus the floor of the neighbors upstairs. Though the lifts are nearly new and operate very quietly they do make some vibration. Standing on the concrete (over sand) floor we never noticed this vibration but it drove the lady upstairs crazy. Actually she’s complained very vocally and angrily about a lot of things, apparently calling and writing every possible authority on a regular basis. Most of her complaints have nothing to do with our activities (there’s another bike workshop next door and several apartments have been renovated), but the vibration was a legitimate issue according to the various city inspectors who visited to investigate.

So the city ordered the building owner (a social housing corporation that manages tens of thousands of properties) to fix the vibration problem. It was decided that the only solution was to totally isolate the lifts from the floor beams, and the only practical way to do that was to build a steel frame all the way to the floor. We’re very fortunate and thankful that they took care of the job and paid for it. But it still requires an investment of several days of our labor to refit the lifts and lights. We took the opportunity to make them fully adjustable on both X and Y axis as well as angle, and now we’re adding more lights. I don’t think a workshop can ever have enough light.

Anyhow, this is all we were thinking about yesterday morning so I got busy with the scaffold, drills, plugs, screws and wiring to hang the fluorescent boxes on our ancient ceiling. And then the first snowy Cargobike and customer came in:

Customer: “My bike is almost impossible to ride. It’s really slow, and I think the brake lever might be broken.”

Mechanic: “I’m pretty sure your cables are frozen.”

Customer: “But I think there’s also something wrong with the brake.”

Mechanic: “The brakes are probably fine but they’re being locked by the frozen cables.”

Customer: “Oh wait, now it seems to be fine.”

Mechanic: “Sure, your bike is indoors so the cable just thawed, releasing the brake. It’ll freeze again a few moments after going outside. If you can wait 15 minutes I’ll fix it.
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A customer just passed a link to this video along: Riding his WorkCycles Fr8 with his two daughters in GMG seats on the rear carrier, and son on the saddle behind the handlebar… plus a big milk crate on the front carrier. Everybody looks pretty happy with the situation. So sweet, thanks very much Ben!

The question whether cycling is decreasing in popularity in Amsterdam or the Netherlands has been raised here several times. Each time the answer has been “No, transportation cycling is actually increasing here.” Today yet more statistics were listed in the Bike Europe trade website that show that bike use continues to rise.

from Bike Europe (via Fietsberaad though I couldn’t find it there) with my commentary mixed in:

AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands – The bicycle is the means of transport used most often in Amsterdam. Between 2005 and 2007 people in the city used their bikes on average 0.87 times a day, compared to 0.84 for their cars. This is the first time that bicycle use exceeds car use.

There are not many places in the world where bicycle use actually exceeds car use, and certainly no other capital cities. But it gets better…

In 2006 the inhabitants of Amsterdam engaged in some 2 million trips a day, an 8% reduction compared to 1990. This is due to the number of trips per person per day falling from 3.6 to 3.1. The number of transfers has fallen in the old city within the ring road in particular.

These seem to be the total numbers of trips, made by all means of transportation.

The number of trips by car, compared to 1990, has fallen in all districts (-14%), whereas the number of trips by bicycle has only risen within the ring road (+36%). The bike is used most often in the town centre (41% versus an average of 28%) and the car least often (10% versus an average of 28%). This can be attributed to the restrictive parking policies enacted here since the 1990s.

Not surprisingly the higher the density, the more bike use is favored. Thus where we live and the WorkCycles shops are the number of bicycle trips is at least four times as great as car trips.

‘Dienst Infrastructuur en Beheer’, the infrastructure department of the city registered approximately 235,000 car movements in both directions at the city centre in 1990; by 2006 this had fallen to 172,000, a decrease of over a quarter. Over the same period the number of daily movements by bicycle rose from 86,000 to over 140,000 (+60%).

Let’s keep up the good work so that in a generation cars will be an insignificant part of the traffic and street scene in Amsterdam.

I’m surprised this little Smart car doesn’t tip over backwards when driving with this huge (70cm frame) WorkCycles Transport Double-Tube. But apparently a man of 200cm (6′ 6″) fits in a Smart.

Photo by Doede van der Linden.

Just browsing through the old photos here, and I came across some nice oldies: January 2004, WorkCycles‘ first shop in the Veemarkt in Amsterdam under construction. We’d cleaned it up from it’s former (extremely dirty) life as a truck garage and installed the platform that’s still in place.

The large beams were purchased new but the rest of the wood was second hand. I bought an entire truckload of used “betonplex” which is an extremely tough and water resistant coated plywood. It’s a very expensive material and I scored it cheaply but… it was covered in concrete molding residue and had thousands of (bend and broken) screws to be removed. It took a friend and I a couple weeks to clean these boards but to this day almost all of the flooring and shelving in the shop is from this purchase.

A few bikes are visible: Gustav Transport trike on the right and on the left a handful of Monarks including a Long John. Except for those big beams, the Gustav transported practically everything needed to build this shop. Sometimes it was loaded with 250+ kg of materials. That bike remained in rental service until 2008 when Melissa Halley purchased it. I’ll tell that story in a following post.

June 2004, WorkCycles Veemarkt shop is open for business. It wasn’t busy yet and here artist friends Sietske Tjallingii and Eric Staller are using it as HQ for a film shoot nearby. I was happy to participate, especially considering the attractive women involved. Kyoko and I didn’t meet until a couple years later.

June 2004, Gustav Transport cargo trike in service as a rolling film platform… for the Conference Bike. That’s me pedaling. They filmed this movie about the CoBi.

Above a couple more recent pics of the WorkCycles Veemarkt shop from Marc of Amsterdamize fame.

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.

Until we can move a ton of goods using no fuel, we’ve got the next best thing. CSX trains can move a ton of goods 423 miles on one gallon of fuel. CSX: How tomorrow moves.

Its great to be promoting train transport, though one can interpret the bicycle cargo example either as the reasonable illustration of an ideal… or as a deliberate absurdity.

Thanks for the tip by Todd Edelman at Green Idea Factory.

Last week we took the night train down to Friedrichshafen, near the Swiss border and famous for just one thing: Zeppelins. Though zeppelins are cool WorkCycles doesn’t have much to do with them. No, we went for the Eurobike 2008 expo, some 17 or so zeppelin hangers full of bike industry geeks and bike porn… or at least its bike porn if you get excited by millions of molded carbon fiber racing bikes, full suspension mountain bikes in more shades of use categories that I can shake a stick at (freeslide, 49′er, XTC, downhell, northwhore, mud…), and dozens of bike brands with cookie cutter bikes at every €50 “price point”. I guess after 30 years in and out of the bike industry it has ceased to knock my socks off.

Now we go to the bike expos looking for very specific, mundane things such as:

a quality leather saddle without pretentiousness and a price to match

hub brakes that can stop a bakfiets, live outdoors and fit a good gear hub

an electric assist system suitable for heavy-duty utility bikes

to see whether anybody else cares about city/utility bikes

And to shake some familiar hands, meet a few new people, and see what the ridiculous new products of of the year are. More about that later.

Every other cycling site and magazine will show you the same competition bred, carbon fiber, disk-brake, metal matrix unobtanium, chinese made but european labelled bling-bling so I’ll focus here on some off the beaten path gems and non-gems. Enjoy and flame away if I’ve trashed your baby and gotten your panties in a bunch!

The most memorable thing I saw at Eurobike 2008 was the flatland freestyle BMX show – or whatever they call it. This was an informal affair with a DJ and a handful of riders in the outdoor area between the expo halls. I don’t think these guys were “pros” or anything or at least there wasn’t much obvious sponsorship going on. But they were awesome. What a demonstration of balance and creativity! Thanks, you made my day in an otherwise boring event!

We arrived a little bit too early so we had to mill about before being allowed to view all the bike goodness inside. Near the entrance was a display of award winning “designs” or something like that. I confess to not reading the signs.

At least three of the bikes displayed here featured a new toothed belt drive system by Gates called “Carbon Drive”. See? Even the belts have carbon in them, though its probably just carbon black in the rubber… which was incidentally a big selling point over at the Continental Tires stand last year, even though its as ordinary as dirt in the woods. Its like advertising “iron enhanced steel” or “new, water with Hydrogen atoms!”. I guess when there’s nothing new under the sun you just have to make something up.

In any case the toothed belt drive is back for another try on bikes as it ought to be. In contrast to previous belt drive systems for bikes this one looks very robust and is adaptable to various types of bikes. The main challenges are:

price – retail for a belt and front and rear sprockets is around €200

special frame required

availability in only limited combinations and lengths

questions about bearing life with tightly tensioned belt installed

In larger scale production the price and availability should be improved so we’ll keep our eyes open for these.

Nick Lobnitz of Carry Freedom trailer fame was showing off prototypes of his new “Paper Bike”. No its not actually made of paper, or even bamboo though Nick has done that before. There is however carbon black in the tires.

The Paper Bike is a clean looking and practical utility bike aimed primarily at bike rental and share systems. The frame loops around the drivetrain effectively protecting it from damage and weather. Simultaneously the resulting surface(s) offer copious space for branding and/or personalization.

Pathetically enough the images above show every new load carrying bike I could find amongst the 17 halls at Eurobike. At least there’s one cool piece among them. Clockwise beginning in the upper left:

Upper left and middle:
Larry vs. Harry (a.k.a. Hans and Lars) of Copenhagen showed off their new Bullitt transport bicycle. Its sort of a Long John on high tech steriods, half aluminium urban racing bike and half I don’t know what. The Bullitt is kitted out with high-zoot parts such as a Shimano Alfine drivetrain and hydraulic disk brakes. The rider’s position is aggressively sporty, there’s no chain guard or lights and the concessions to daily use are minimal. It’s dangerously, uncompromisingly cool. I’ve no idea who’ll buy them but I do want one for myself! We’re curious enough to put a couple in the showrooms at WorkCycles.

Richard and I each rode the Bullitt a couple times with and without loads. It’s as stiff as a log and the seating position wasn’t as extreme as it looked ( at least not for this ape-armed ex-racer who already has his city bike handlebars lower than the saddle). What wasn’t so convincing was the steering geometry. We both ride long-wheelbase transport bikes regularly and we each noted that the Bullitt is notably less stable and secure handling than the Bakfiets Cargobike or Fietsfabriek 995. The bike still needs some front end geometry tweaking and we hope that Harry and Larry are listening.

Upper right:
Bernds in Germany showed a couple prototypes of this Bakfiets Cargobike like child transporter. We weren’t sure whether to take it seriously as the box was just hastily made from plywood and the steering linkage wasn’t even functional; the front wheel could only be turned a few degrees in one direction.

Lower left:
A Dutch-Israeli firm called Taga displayed this multifunctional child carrier that can be converted between tricycle and stroller. Unlike the similar sounding TrioBike (which I’ve previously maligned for various reasons – see here and here) and Zigo, the Taga approaches its tasks very differently: “Continuity” is the operative word for the Taga, meaning that no parts of the bike/stroller need to be left behind. The entire machine converts (rather ambitiously I’ll add) between the two basic modes. The stroller mode was particularly slick.

Richard and I rode the Taga (in trike mode obviously) and at least at slow speeds around the exhibit halls it felt unfamiliar but handled well. It remains to be seen how it’ll feel at higher speeds and under the more varied conditions of the real world roads. The conversion mechanism appeared straightforward and solid. The people I talked to mentioned a number of other issues that are being worked on and all in all it appears a very professional outfit.

Lower middle:
Oh, gimme a break people!

Lower right:
The most serious recent entry into the transport bicycle market is the Accell Group with their Accell Pro division. Accell is the owner of such brands as Batavus, Sparta, Winora, Hercules, Koga Miyata, Redline and Lapierre. They sell approximately 950,000 bicycles per year with a turnover of just under €500 million. Accell will focus on Postal Delivery (taking over where the recently imploded Biria left off), Cargo, Rental and Corporate bicycles. I guess Accell must have been jealous of WorkCycles’ success in this area.

And the winner of the “I can’t believe anybody would be so stupid as to invest so much R&D and promotion into such a worthless concept as this” award goes to the Body Buddy. Not only did these people have huge stand with dozens of these things, they had also an entire team of pretty girls merrily stepping their way around the expo halls in impossibly short bodybuddytm yellow miniskirts.

From the bodybuddy website the following prose:

“The greatest ideas, the ideas that rewrite history, almost always come from people who originate from rural areas…”

“nevertheless, the “bodybuddy” will change today’s streetscape quite a bit”

“Why work out on the spot when it is possible to convert this energy into movement?”

What a novel idea, converting human energy into movement! Yes, let’s invent a crazy machine that does this and then introduce it at the world’s biggest bicycle expo! Brilliant.

I’ve come across a number of thorough and well-written reviews (and some not so good) of various child-transport and family bikes & trikes:

Bakfiets.nl Cargobike
Let’s Go Ride a Bike
BIKE2WORK2LIVE2BIKE
Velo Vision
Bicycle Fixation
Bike Utah Valley
EcoMetro

Bakfietsgigant, Bakfietsweb, Couleurs, DoubleDutchBikes (USA), Redy Kangaroo, Hollandia, PImmies, Trendonline, Tricycleweb (all seem to sell the same bikes)
“Karin” (Dutch language)

Christiania (Trike)
“Marga & Huub” (Dutch language)

Faya4you
Guest post from Haarlem in this blog

Fietsfabriek 995
Caliban’s experience with the FF 995 and notes on other bikes too

Gazelle Cabby
Bakfiets.co.uk

Winther Kangaroo
Musings from a Stonehead

TV consumer program Kassa tests 13 bakfietsen from Dutch and Danish producers Included are: Bakfiets.nl, Christiania, Fietsfabriek, Nihola, Winther, ‘t Mannetje, Bakfietsgigant, Halfords, Johnny Loco, Babboe and WorkCycles
My english language translation of the bakfiets test
The original bakfiets test report in Dutch language
My post with comments about the program and results.

Bakfiets.nl vs. Fietsfabriek 995 vs. Gazelle Cabby
Bakfiets.co.uk (again)

Bakfiets.nl Cargobike vs. Smart Car
Part one: Measurements
Part two: Features

Bakfiets.nl Cargobike & Cargotrike, Bakfietsweb, Christiania, Gazelle Cabby, New Viper, Triobike!… In French language.
Vélo Brouette

Now that I’ve been “collecting” these links for some time the reviews have become more balanced, covering a broader range of bikes than I first found.

Here’s one more review in Dutch though its already three years old and wasn’t very objective to begin with: Fietsersbond bakfiets test. Its in Dutch and no direct link is available.

Here on the “Groot Gezin” (big family) chat site there is a long thread with discussion about many of the child transport bikes and trikes. The focus is generally on the cheap bakfiets options and like any discussion the opinions are to be taken with a grain of salt. Dutch Language.

Does anybody have any suggestions, particularly about other well-known bikes such as Nihola and Christiania? Please keep the discussion to family transport bikes and not transport bikes in general.