Riding the Rails

Posted on December 5, 2013 by Angela

Our son, R, is four, and he is obsessed with the entire MBTA transit system. It started with the Red Line, which we take quite frequently because it is our local train. Some time ago, R memorized all of the stations from Alewife to JFK, and they came up frequently in his train play at home: “Last stop, Alewife. Thank you for riding the T. Please remember to take your baloneys.” At some point, I realized that he had never been south of Andrew, and I innocently suggested that we might go to one of the southern ends of the train. We ended up planning together a trip to Mattapan, which you can get to via a loop of “high speed rail” that goes between the end of the red line at Ashmont and Mattapan.

Courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannyman/2699949371/

The high speed rail. Courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannyman/2699949371/

The trip was exciting. The line between Ashmont and Mattapan offers a bumpy and fun ride, through some pretty wooded areas, including a cemetery. Although he’d been talking about visiting “Mattapam” for at least a week, he wasn’t really interested in the station, and wanted to board for our return trip quickly. I managed to talk him off the train again at Butler, where we walked on the bike path for a little while. But I quickly learned that what R loves best about taking the train is, simply, taking the train. In fact, he wanted to get home quickly to play with his toy trains after we stopped to have some lunch with his grandmother in South Station.

Young boy standing next to MBTA sign at Quincy Center

R at Quincy Center station

But his imagination was hooked. Next we had to go to Braintree, and R decided that he wanted to visit Quincy. He started to work on memorizing all of the stops on both ends of the Red Line fork, and he can now recognize most of the station names on the Red Line and can walk into any Red Line station and tell you when the next Ashmont, Braintree, and Alewife trains are coming by “reading” the signs.

Boy lying on floor, looking at MBTA system map

R studying the MBTA system map, planning a trip

It was after our second trip that he started to use the MBTA system map to get creative. He planned a trip that took us from Davis Square on the Red Line to Park Street, on the underground path to Downtown Crossing, and on the orange line to Forest Hills. R had planned for us to take the 31 to Mattapan (and then to catch the high speed rail back to the Red Line), but we ended up deciding to take the 51 instead. We took it all the way to Cleveland Circle, took the C line back to North Station, boarded another Green Line train to Lechmere, and finally hopped on the 88 bus back to Davis Square. It’s like the world’s best outing, where the only real point is riding buses and trains, the only real stop we made was at a coffee shop to use the restroom. Near the end of the trip he was anxious to get home and play trains with his elaborately set-up wood train tracks.

Since then, we have spent hours riding a variety of subway lines and buses, in routes planned by R, with the primary point of the route to be long and to involve the maximum number of connections possible. He has been delighted to ride all of the subway lines in one day, and he has taken trips with friends and with his grandma. He spends hours planning train and bus trips, and can now read the part of the system map that tells him how often the buses come during rush hour and outside of rush hour. He has worn out two different system maps (we just covered a third system map in contact paper in hopes that it will survive his love) and he is excited about the possibility of taking a train trip to New York City to ride their subway system.

If you are a carfree family, in a city that is well-served by transit, consider the entertainment value of the transit itself. R really doesn’t want to use subways and buses to get to someplace, for him the fun is in riding them. He loves to announce upcoming stops, to see who is getting on and off, to choose which car he wants to ride (usually the last, sometimes the first), to count down the minutes as a train approaches, to see new parts of the city from the windows of a bus without the bother of having to stop and do something, and to plan his next trip as soon as he has gotten home. He gets positively giddy when he sees two trains pass going opposite directions, or when two trains arrive in the station at the same time. He also loves things like going to South Station where you can watch trains come in, speculate about future trips, see the model trains in December, and eat the best pizza in the world (which, according to R, is Regina’s Pizza in South Station).

We were also all very excited when recently heard that Adham Fisher, a British “transit racer” and Cambridge teen Miles Taylor who blogs at Miles on the MBTA, set a new record for the shortest time through every MBTA station. It is inspiring and exciting to see that there are older kids and adults who continue to enjoy and challenge themselves through transit. We have gotten excited about people like Joe Eskenazi who rode from Los Angeles to San Francisco on local transit. We’ve been trying to figure out ways to do that on the east coast (say from Boston to DC — though at first pass, it looks like there’s big gap in transit along the East coast between Providence, RI and New Haven, CT, so we might have to bend the rules). Next week, R and I start on a series of “alphabetical” trips, where we visit different MBTA stops in alphabetical order — our first route should hit A-F using the red line, green line, one bus, and the orange line. Stay tuned!

Posted in Child-related issues, Public transportation, Recreation and Travel | Tagged , , , , , , | 1 Comment

bikepool

Posted on November 20, 2013 by nathan

About two and a half years ago, my job situation changed and I took on a massive commute. I make a 50-mile 2 & 1/4 hour one-way trip by subway and train (sometimes bike & train) to get to work. Given my field, the point I’m at in my career, and the situation of the rest of my family for work & school, this is the right choice for now. Fortunately I don’t have to go physically to the office every day (I go 3-4 days per week), and I have generous friends near my lab who let me stay with them overnight once a week, which eases the commute burden. We’ve arranged our lives so that it’s do-able, but it is still hard.

The commute itself is not so bad — I can work on the train, read my book on the subway, or exercise on my bike (when I ride to the train station, which is honestly not that often). It doesn’t feel like time wasted, and I actually enjoy it. The real problem though is lack of flexibility. When my job was in town, if Angela needed to stay late or couldn’t cover one of her usual drop offs or pick ups for the kids, it was easy for me to cover for her (and vice versa). But now, if I need to cover pickup on a day I’m at the office, I have to leave work at 1:15pm. Which means I just can’t go, so every schedule wrinkle has to be dealt with in advance, and the demands on Angela’s flexibility to cover minor changes have increased. I still take a day home per week with my kids (which makes up for some of the other very late and very early hours that I’m gone), and we’ve worked things out such that there are still days I do the kid-transporting, but we have lost our ability to easily adjust when something changes (and yes, this extra commute burden is part of why our writing here has been so minimal lately…or rather, nonexistent).

Angela has been struggling with some health issues. She’s fine, and is getting better, but making the 5-mile-round-trip-with-some-hills-bakfiets-double-pick-up bike ride twice each week (on H’s hebrew school days) hasn’t been possible for her for the last few months. She was doing it by bus, but that took a lot longer and then the evening was very rushed and unpleasant, and the kids got to bed too late. I tried to figure out if I could do the hebrew school pick up if I got my bike parked in just the right spot and caught the right train, but the timing just didn’t work, at least not without a solid last minute back-up plan if I ended up stuck on the red line at ten to six. We arranged a few one-off pickups by other parents, but it’s hard to keep asking over and over, and the logistical burden felt greater than just taking the bus and dealing with the late evening.

One evening I was out with my friend J. I told him about our pickup struggle, and my frustration about not being able to just cover it. He said, “Wait, why don’t you guys pick up our kid at the daycare right by your house and we’ll pick up H. We have to pick up our older kid at hebrew school anyway. Then we can come by your place trade kids. That would actually be better for us because C (J’s wife) could leave work a little later.”

Since this plan was mutually beneficial, it seemed like it might actually work in a more stable way, so we tried it. For about a month, we’ve been picking up our friends’ 3 y.o. at a daycare right near our house, and they’ve been picking up our 2nd grader at hebrew school a couple miles away twice a week.

And it’s working. Our friends say it’s easier (or at least not worse) from their end (and I trust they’ll tell us when/if that changes, especially now that Angela is feeling somewhat better and our need is less acute). From our end, the change has opened up some breathing room in our week, and provided some needed relief from the logistical (and physical) burden of getting through our week.

Angela brings the two younger kids home from pickup (by bakfiets, the 3 y.o. loves the bike ride), gets a jump on dinner, and I walk in just as our friends are arriving to trade kids. Even though there are often 6 people (besides me) in the house when I walk in, it feels less tense and less chaotic. The kids are happier. Angela is happier.

This change has been a lovely thing for our kids. There are a total of four kids in both of our families. We see each other pretty often in various constellations, at hebrew school, and at our religious community (the Hav), and socially with other families and friends. In all of that coming and going, I now realize that our younger two kids have never had time together just them. Now, twice a week, they get a relaxed 45 minute chunk of time to play together at our house without older siblings around. Our son is about a year and a half older than their’s, and it’s been lovely to see him start to see J & C’s kid as an actual person, and to get some time as “the big kid.” They play beautifully when they aren’t distracted by trying to get the older kids to include them. J & C report that the bigger kids chat pleasantly on the way home, and that it’s a different dynamic than pickup with their own two kids competing for parental attention.

I’ve been thinking about why we had to get to such a frustrated place to realize this arrangement was sitting right before our eyes, that we could actually team up with another family to make both of our evenings easier. I’ve wondered about this before, like the times another parent takes H after school because we’ve had a schedule snafu (or we do the same for them), and the kids have such a great time I leave thinking “we really shouldn’t wait for things to go haywire to do this.”

We think and talk a lot about community. One of the reasons we choose to live without a car is that it helps us connect with and build our local community, just by living our everyday lives. Living carfree sometimes means our life is easier than it would be without a car (say when we aren’t stuck digging our car out after the snowstorm), and sometimes means our life is harder (that double pickup wouldn’t have been a problem if Angela isn’t feeling well if she could just drive). Sometimes it means we rely on friends with cars (say, when they come to visit us from the suburbs instead of us going to them, or when C does the hebrew school pickup by car).

But for of all our talk of community, it’s still hard to ask for help. I don’t want to burden other people, especially other parents, who are pretty much all as stretched thin in the evenings as we are, especially if part of the reason we’re sruggling in a situation is that we’re still insisting on going without a car (though, even if we wanted to, we still can’t afford one anyway).

In this arguably small arrangement, this twice a week that we have someone else’s kid on our bike, and they have one of ours in their car (or on the bus), I see a part of how community is built out of the challenges, that we got to build this connection a little more deeply because something was too hard for us to do on our own. I see now that this has been true on a larger scale over the last couple of years, which have been hard ones for our family, on several fronts — hard, but really good. I feel like I’ve let so much go: any PTA meeting ever, attendence at shabbat services, social groups and projects that I used to help organize, writing here. I’ve been knocking myself for these failings, for not doing my part to build the communities that I say I believe in. But I can see also that friendships have been forged more deeply in this time, and that counts too. For this, I am grateful. For this, and for the way our friends’ son comes happily with us at pickup, grins all the way back to our house on the bike, and then slips peacefully into discussion about the proper way to build subway stations out of magnatiles and wooden railroad tracks.

Posted in Benefits of being carfree, Best of, Biking with kids, Child-related issues, Going and staying carfree, Living locally, Problems and issues, Public transportation | Leave a comment

Biking isn’t really my thing

Posted on November 13, 2013 by Angela

“I don’t really like biking all that much.” I said this the other day at the playground at my daughter’s school and was met with shock and outrage. So I thought I should explain myself.

I bike a lot. Most often, I am riding a bakfiets, with or without my kids. Because I ride an interesting bike, I talk to people every day about my bike. I talk enthusiastically. I love my bike. I feel happy riding it, and I like being noticed on it.

But I don’t really like “biking.” Perhaps that makes no sense, because I’m sort of a biking evangelist. Biking is a big part of how we get around as a carfree family. But here’s the thing. Think of all of the people that you know that own cars. How many of them love cars? Some of them do, but lots of them feel “meh” about cars, and I’m betting some of those car owners actually hate their cars. Cars are just how most people get around, you don’t have to be that excited about them to make use of them.

Bikes are different. Biking as an adult is strictly a recreational or sporting activity for most people. It comes with an obsession with gear and funny outfits. There just aren’t that many utility and family bikers (although our numbers are growing), and that means that most of us had to work hard and obsess a fair amount to find ourselves with the bikes that we use every day. Thus many of the family and utility bikers out there love biking and the biking culture because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have the lifestyle that they have.

On most days I get from place to place by biking on an 80 pound of bike with 90 pounds of kids plus my own weight. Frankly, that seems like plenty to me. I don’t usually want to take a bike ride on the weekend for fun, much to the sorrow of my husband. Weekends are for resting, not biking. I don’t want to think about bike gear. Actually, I do aspire to buy a nice bike for my own non-cargo, non-kid use, something that looks good and doesn’t weigh a million pounds. But I don’t care about the brand or what bells and whistles it might have. Like most car owners, I want transportation that looks nice, works, and isn’t more than I can afford. When it comes time to buy, I’ll talk to my friends and ask Carice at Bicycle Belle for advice.

I don’t want to do group bike rides, or hang out at most bike events. I tend to feel out of place at those because of the whole not-really-into-bikes thing. I do enjoy talking to other people who have a similar relationship to biking, like Stacy Bisker of A Simple Six, who I got to meet and chat with the other day. I have enjoyed the family biking events that I have been involved in, which have given me a chance to connect with other people in a similar boat.

So what do I want out of biking? I want roads that are safe for me, and that are built with my needs as a biker in mind. I want a bike that is comfortable to ride in the city, one that fits my small body, has a step-through frame, and lets me haul kids and other stuff. I want to be able to occasionally hang out and swap stories with other people that ride like me, because it’s the way they get around town. I want to sometimes ride my bike in a parade.* I have many of these things, and I am grateful for them, even if biking isn’t really my thing.

Woman on a bike made up to look like a boat

*This is what I love about biking

Posted in Biking, Biking with cargo, Biking with kids | Tagged , , , , , | 11 Comments

You can buy a bakfiets in Boston! (actually Somerville)

Posted on September 9, 2013 by nathan

The Boston area has been sorely lacking a true cargo and family bike shop. Ferris Wheels in Jamaica Plain has been stocking Yubas for a long time (which is great!), but that was the only style of cargo bike (at least one suitable for carrying kids) that was reliably available for test ride in a retail shop in the entire Boston metro area. Anyone shopping in earnest for a cargo or family bike was stuck trying to network to arrange test rides with other bike owners behind the scenes. We provided very many of those test rides, sometimes so frequently I felt like it was my second job (only no one paid me for it — though we did once get a half-dozen delicious eggs from a friend’s backyard chickens for our trouble!). After all that work, you were then stuck taking a road trip or paying a big shipping fee to get the bike into town (sometimes several hundred dollars).

But our time has finally come!

A couple months ago, Bicycle Belle* opened near Porter Square in Somerville,  at the intersection of Beacon and Oxford (368 Beacon St, Somerville).

Longtime blogger at Biking in Heels has opened a shop filled with beautiful city bikes, clever accessories and CARGO BIKES.

For family biking, the shop is currently stocking Workcycles Bakfiets (short and long), the Fr8 and the Gr8, Xtracycle (including Radish and Edgerunner, the Edgerunner isn’t on the floor yet, it will be soon). As of my last visit, they also had a Kinn mid-tail on the floor. The shop is also stocking the kind of bike accessories family bikers need, like yepp maxi and mini seats, the burley piccolo trailer bike (this is what we have behind our bakfiets), bern helmets including kid sizes, the lazer bob helmet (one of the few helmets that actually fits small toddlers), and handlebar coffee cup holders (that last one is important).

I’ve also been really impressed by how much the shop owner, Carice, has reached out to the local family and cargo bike community. She’s really listening to what we want and need, and is stocking her shop based on hard-won knowledge about what actually works from those of us on the front lines. Several friends have also been working with her to find bikes that will work for their families, and from what I hear, Carice has been working to make sure they get bikes that will really work for them.

We couldn’t be happier to have a shop like this in the neighborhood…and to pass some of the local cargo bike test ride traffic her way. If you are in the market, or just want to try out one of these great bikes, then pay Bicycle Belle a visit.

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*Other than some snacks at the grand opening party, we’ve received no compensation for this post, and weren’t asked to write it. We just think this shop is awesome and really want it to succeed.

Posted in Biking with cargo, Biking with kids, Cambridge and Boston area, Links and reviews | 3 Comments

This year’s offering to the winter visibility g-ds

Posted on December 27, 2012 by Nathan

It seems like every winter I end up forking over at least a hundred bucks to feel sort of visible out on the road after dark (and this time of year, a lot of our bike riding is after dark). This year is all about adding reflective tape to everything. In a city environment like the one we ride in there is a lot of ambient light, and that light is often moving (e.g. headlights). I’ve noticed on other riders that in this setting reflective material can go a long way. I got particularly inspired on our helmets. Check out how awesome my family looks in these!

H (in the blue helmet) requested flowers. R (in the red helmet) requested a train and flowers. Angela (in the purple) didn’t know what she wanted, but I ended up going for a sort of mythological motif, with wings and lightning bolts. For those wanting to try this on their own, I used “Reflexite” tape** ordered from this place, and just cut out the designs. I did it all freeform, so I can’t really offer patterns (just inspiration), but if you’re at all crafty, I’m sure you can come up with something! Note that this particular tape comes in many widths and many colors.  I ordered both 1″ and 2″ widths, but could have done all these designs with the 1″ width.  One roll of the 1″ tape would do a lot of helmets (the “hundred bucks” quote above also involved reflective tape for coats, Xtracycle bags, and bakfiets box, and a bunch of leftovers…)

You can tell I improved substantially after my first attempt on my helmet, before I was inspired to get fancy by H’s request for flowers (I’m trying to tell myself it looks punk rock…):

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**I didn’t do an exhaustive research project to find this stuff, mostly just scanned a couple bike forums to find out what other people liked, and it seems to do the trick. If anyone else has a favorite reflective tape, please speak up in comments.

Posted in Biking, Links and reviews | 4 Comments

Xtracycle Hooptie: Initial Impressions

Posted on December 25, 2012 by Nathan

We set up our Xtracycle almost 5 years ago, when our now 6 1/2 year old daughter was not quite 2. It’s hard to explain how different the cargo and family bike market was back then (or the family-biking-blog scene, for that matter). The only true extended frame on the market was the Big Dummy, though the Kona Ute came out shortly after we set up our Xtra. There was no Yuba. There was no Madsen. I think the only place to buy a bakfiets in the US may have been Clever Cycles, though to be honest, I didn’t even know what a bakfiets was.

The Xtracycle freeradical extension had been around for a long time by then, but even so, we felt like we were blazing new ground. The only child seat that Xtra sold back then was the bobike maxi, which didn’t even attach to the deck itself, and which, as it turned out, didn’t work on our bike (that was one of our first experiences of the sometimes difficult interactions between smallish bikes and bike accessories), and with no other options, we got resourceful and got a great double deck seat from Rob Hanson, one of several resourceful folks making DIY wooden seats (these days you can attach two Yepp Maxi’s to an Xtracycle deck or two Peanut Shells to a Yuba, but back then, there was no way on the market to strap in two smaller kids to the deck of an extended frame bike).

Rob’s seat served us well for many years, though, as we’ve documented here on occasion, we struggled some in general hauling two kids on an longtail, especially as the younger one got bigger, and especially Angela. She is tiny (5′ 1″) and had trouble getting on and off the bike as we did not have a step through frame. Tiny-ness on longtails works against you in some other ways also, because the more weight and upper body strength the adult rider has, the easier any weight rear on the bike (like that second kid) is to handle, and even for me (I’m about 5′ 5″ and a little stronger), starts, stops and slow speeds required a lot of care. With one kid, the Xtra was fabulous for us. With two? Well. You all already know we got a bakfiets.

The bakfiets immediately became our go-to for hauling two kids. It is extremely stable and secure, even at low speeds and stops. Wiggles from kids barely impact the handling at all. And while, yes, it is beastly heavy, we find the strength it requires is strength we have. That is, even though Angela is little, she has the strength to power up hills on it heavily loaded with the handling so stable. What she didn’t have was enough upper body strength to confidently handle the longtail, so perhaps strangely, we find that the heavier bike actually requires less overall strength (which doesn’t always mean we’re happy riding it up hills, but you get the idea).

But even with our love of the bakfiets, our Xtra still got some use. I would grab it to run errands when I didn’t want that extra weight (the bakfiets weighs about 80lbs, our old Xtra set up weighed about 45). I’d grab it if I needed to haul 1-kid, especially if I also needed to pick up groceries, but neither of us would ride it with two. Our bigger kid had outgrown the straps I’d fashioned for Rob’s seat, and the younger one was getting close. Now, I could have made bigger ones, but at some point, it starts to seem really silly to strap in a 6 year-old on a bike deck, and it was starting to become clear it might be time to move on from the deck seats, beautiful as they are (and I’d like to note here that Rob’s work on those seats was really good. We rode hard with those seats for many years, and stored the bike outside, mostly covered in rain but not always perfectly covered, and the seats held up beautifully. He did really great work).

A usual solution here would be to switch back to the snap deck, and add stoker bars. Unfortunately, again with the short adult rider thing, Angela rides with the seat very very low, and we would have had to fashion some sort of DIY solution to raise the handles far enough for a rider on the deck (the standard Xtra stoker bar wouldn’t have worked). That certainly would have been possible, but as with many DIY projects around here, the list is far longer than I have time for, and after 6 months or so of knowing I needed to figure it out, I had made zero progress. The other problem with a stoker bar is that it’s harder to figure out how a second kid can hang on (and our younger one likes to feel secure, so he’s not a very good candidate for just holding onto the bigger kid, though that works for some families just fine), and I had some hope the bike could be resurrected as a two-kid bike once the rear-kid could move farther “up” the deck.

So, when Xtra came out with the Hooptie — a handrail that goes all the way around the deck, we went for it. Specific perks in our situation are that it does not need to attach to the seat post at all (which would have made it not work on our bike), and gives a secure place for a rear-seated kid to hold on. Great DIY versions of this have been out there for a while, so I’m glad to see Xtra pick up on this good idea and make it for those of us without either access to a machine shop or the time/inclination to fashion one together ourselves.

I got it installed a couple weeks ago, and the install was pretty successful. I don’t think I swore at all (bonus hint: I recommend installing both brackets pretty loosely to the deck, and installing *both* side rails, before firmly tightening the bolts at the end of the deck — in contrast to the official directions that suggest just to install one side bar before tightening).

After a couple weeks riding with the hooptie, I have a few impressions. First, the sizing on this thing is great. Both our kids fit in great, including the bigger one, and I see this serving us very well for many years. The Xtra still rides beautifully with one kid, and now with the hooptie, either kid can fit. This really expands the range of daily errands we can do on this bike easily (with H solidly grown out of the previous seat straps, we’d only been using this bike with R). As far as riding with two, it is better than our old seat, but still a challenge. Even with the back kid scootched up a little bit on the deck, it’s still solidly outside the range that Angela can handle comfortably, but it makes enough difference that I can do it again. The bakfiets is still my first choice for two, but if it’s not available or the logistics of the day work better for us both to have a two-kid bike, I will grab this one and be glad to have the option. I had been a little concerned about loading the kids on the bike, but find that with the kickback and me standing near the bike to stabilize it, both of our kids are capable of climbing in themselves (have the one seated at the rear climb in first). To dismount, I do tend to help, but lifting them down is easier than lifting them up.

So, overall, I’m happy with the purchase. It moved our Xtra into this new stage of our lives, and makes the bike more useable for more types of errands now that either kid can fit. I really like having a lighter 1-kid-plus-cargo option (we find the Xtra is actually better and more flexible than the bakfiets for cargo). This is still not going to be our go-to two-kid bike, but it’s good to have the option available in a pinch, and those bars on the top are going to be awesome for strapping in way more groceries. I’m glad Xtra is paying attention to the needs of biking families. This was definitely a need, and they filled it well.

[Also, given my notes on challenges of longtail handling above, I'd like to give a mention to the not-quite-out-yet new Xtracycle EdgeRunner. Check out Hum of the City's impressions here. It really looks like this bike could fix several of the longtail handling problems for small riders and/or those riding with two kids. The kids are held much lower on the bike over a 20" rear wheel, which should really reduce the difficulty with weight to the back of the bike, and the lower standover height should make the bike much more suited to smaller adults. If we were in the market for a longtail right now, I'd definitely be waiting to give this one a try]

Posted in Biking, Biking with cargo, Biking with kids, Links and reviews | 1 Comment

Co-rider: the good, the bad, the ugly

Posted on November 26, 2012 by Nathan

I really love riding with our youngest (R, now almost 3 1/2) on a front-mounted bike seat. It’s pretty much my favorite way to ride with one kid, provided we don’t have to haul much stuff with us. Thus, I was pretty sad when it became clear he was growing out of his bobike mini. Like most front-mounted seats, typically-sized kids tend to grow out of that one at about age 3.

Other parents report feeling wistful and a maybe little sad when, say, their children wean, or no longer fall asleep in arms, or start rejecting hugs at school drop-off. Me? I have that feeling when my kids grow out of bike seats or learn to ride on their own. Goodness knows what I’m going to do when they no longer need to be attached to an adult bike to ride on the street. I’ll be a total mess (and very proud).

So, when a co-rider, one of the very few front-mounted bike seats that claims to work for children over age 3 (the manufacturer claims usability for about ages 2-5) came up used for a good price on a local list-serve, I jumped on it, and crossed my fingers this seat might get me one or two more years.

The co-rider is an updated version of the bike-tutor, which was reviewed favorably by totcycle. My understanding is that the co-rider was intended to be compatible with a broader range of frames.

That seems like a nice idea, but this report at Hum of the City indicates that may well not be the reality. On their (extremely step-through) Breezer bike, the seat failed dramatically, tipping backwards while they were riding in traffic. Amazon reviews report a theme of similar problems. The guy we bought our seat from claimed not to have any issues on a somewhat slanted (but not step-through) top-tube, but we recently found out that a local bike friend had exactly this issue with the seat tipping back on a mountain bike with only a moderate slope to the top tube.

Even with all this info out there, I still wanted to try the seat. Why? In all the reports, the problem is with a slanted top tube, and my old road bike has a completely horizontal top tube. From what I could tell of the seat design from pictures, on my bike, the seat would be completely supported by the tube, and thus I had a reasonable hope that any reasons behind the reported failures wouldn’t apply in my case. So, what did I find once I had the seat in hand?

The Good:

As it turns out, my expectation was reasonable. On my bike, the install was pretty smooth (took about a 45 minutes), the entire seat is supported by the top tube and the install feels extremely secure. I’ll feel comfortable using the seat until R can’t fit in it anymore. With the Bobike, as R got taller, his helmet would bob around in front of my chin. It was OK, but inconvenient. I could have solved this issue with more wraparound handlebars, but that was more effort than I was willing to put in for a seat he would grow out of soon. In contrast, with this seat, R sits low on the front of the top tube, so he is no longer up so close to my face. We also have less conflict over where his hands should go, because he has his own handlebars (I keep meaning to give him his own bell). My knees touch his sides slightly when I ride with him, but it’s pretty minimal, and is not an issue at all when he’s not on the bike because the seat itself is quite narrow. Overall, for my particular bike, I’m really happy to have this seat so I can ride happily with my pre-schooler in front of me (and put off the reality that my kids are growing up) just a tad bit longer.

The Bad:

That’s the good stuff. But there is definitely bad stuff. I’m pretty decent at figuring out how to install seats, but I’ve seen some impressively poorly installed seats out there, and part of me wondered if maybe the people having trouble with this seat were just doing it wrong.

After examining the seat myself, I’d say that no, they weren’t doing it wrong. In fact, I’d go so far as to say this seat should absolutely not be used on any bikes except those with completely horizontal top tubes. Now, why is that?

It looks like in an attempt to make this seat compatible with step-through frames, this seat is made with a hinged support. This support runs between a clamp to the top tube and the base of the seat. That’s all well and good. The problem is, at both ends, this support can rotate freely, and is only clamped in place by a bolt. There is nothing in the design of the seat that truly locks the support at a specific angle. There’s a paltry attempt at introducing enough friction between the pieces (a pattern of ridges between connecting components where the bolt goes through), but there is no way this is strong enough to hold up reliably to the regular bouncing all of our bikes take out on the road, especially with a 40 pound child bouncing on top of them.

After examining the seat, my take is that this problem will be more of a concern on some bikes than others. For example, on the Hum of the City bike, the top tube on the breezer is so steep, the bracket couldn’t even really provide true support even if the bolts were super tight. I’d say this bike is just solidly outstide a reasonable range of compatibility (which the manufacturers should have made clear). With every bump the child’s weight would push the seat backwards, and with such a steep tube, the fall could be (and sounds like it was) dramatic when the bolts fail. On a bike with a less dramatic slant, the pressure on those bolted hinge points would be much less, but it would still be there, and it’s still hard for me to imagine any way to keep the seat tight enough to be safe on every single ride, and as I said, our friends with a moderate slant on their mountain bike top tube had exactly this problem (and returned their seat).

With all this said, I’m guessing some people have done OK with this seat on more step-through frames. They certainly claim as much in their amazon reviews. Maybe they check the bolts every time. Maybe they are very very strong or used a torque wrench when they installed the seat. Maybe they just don’t ride very often, so they either haven’t experienced the problem or their install is still holding up. But for my part, as just another biking parent (but one who has seen and installed a fair number of seats and rides more days than not) I see this as a very real and dangerous design flaw, and do not recommend using the seat on any bike that does not have a completely horizontal top tube. I feel this strongly enough that I sometimes feel guilty having the seat on our bike, as someone might see it on our bike, look up the info, see the manufacturers claims of broad compatibility, and install on an unsuitable bike. Maybe I should put a note on one of the leg guards.

The Ugly:

Despite my enjoyment of this seat on my particular bike, wow, it sure is ugly. And heavy. Much heavier than it needs to be. But I’m still keeping it, and using it, and when I hand it on, I’ll make sure it goes to someone using it on an appropriate bike.

Other options:

Since this option will only really work on a select group of bikes, are there other options for riding with a kid in front after the standard front seats are too small? I know of the a couple. The ibert claims a weight limit of 38 lbs, which will get you to something like age 4 by weight for many kids. However, I understand from friends who have ridden with this seat that kids tend to grow out of the seat by size well before this limit. There is also a new seat on the market, the tyke toter, that claims to work for the same age range as the co-rider (about 2-5). I have not yet heard any first hand reports (please speak up if you have tried it), but just eyeballing it, I’m not sure how much I’d trust that single clamp onto the seat post as the only support for the seat. I hear that the dutch have nice simple seats that are just a saddle that clamps to the top tube and footrests for the downtube. I don’t know where one might find the dutch version in the states, but I do know that some folks over here do the same thing DIY. Other than that, I’m out of ideas, but this is a common need for which I often wish I had better suggestions (especially for folks trying to ride with two kids on one standard adult bike, where rear seats are incompatible with trailer bikes). If you know of another solution, please speak up.

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***As with all the info on this blog, these thoughts are offered as the opinion of one parent biking with their kids. This review wasn’t sponsored (none of ours are). As always, use your own judgment to decide what is safe for your family.

 

Posted in Biking with kids, Child-related issues, Links and reviews | 10 Comments

Come ride with us! (Honk! parade 2012)

Posted on October 4, 2012 by Nathan

For years we have crashed the Honk! Parade, an amazing non-motorized parade from Davis in Somerville to Harvard Square in Cambridge, full of raucous activist street bands from all over the world, and the purpose of which is to “Take back the streets for Horns Bike and Feet!” That’s a sentiment we can get behind here at CFWK. The parade is part of the annual Honk! Fest (full schedule here) starting tonight (Thursday) and running all weekend.

This year, we’re more organized, and have our own parade contingent of cargo and family bikers! Please come ride with us! You don’t need to be on a fancy bike, though if you have a weird or interesting one, we’d sure love to see it. Kids can come on their own bikes provided they bring a grown-up, and they ride well enough to navigate a crowd and follow instructions.

If you’d like to join us, please contact us at carfreewithkids at gmail and we’ll give you the details.

Hope to see you there!

(Also, as an added bonus, the bikes will be right in front of my brass band, and there’s a great story about our band and Honk! on radio boston and the boston globe)

 

Posted in Going and staying carfree | 2 Comments

True Life Stories of the Carfree: Leigh and her family of four, West suburbs of Chicago

Posted on August 14, 2012 by Angela

How is it August already? Our summer has been so filled with fun that we keep getting too distracted to write about. Instead, we’ve got another carfree family for inspiration for us and all of you. Leigh writes below about being a carfee family of four that relies primarily on walking and transit. If your family is carfree, we all need your inspiration, so drop us a line at carfreewithkids@gmail.com. We promise we’ll try not to wait two months to publish your post!

There are four of us, my husband and I, Monkey who is three, and Bee who is one and a bit. We live in the near west suburbs of Chicago. On a quiet afternoon you can hear the ‘L’ train announcements and the Metra commuter rail bells from the station an block and a half away. There are a few bike lanes and good sidewalks. My husband works downtown takes the train to and from work. He prefers the commuter rail with its nicer cars and faster ride, even though it runs less frequently and he has a longer walk at the end. It is a 35 minute commute door to door. If he misses that train, or is traveling at an odd time he takes the CTA L train (subway). I stay at home with the kids (I work online for the wonderful Camberville Diaper Lab). Day to day we get everywhere by foot and stroller. For occasional trips downtown, to target, the airport or to museums we take the train and bus. We take the CTA train and walk though a park to get to church on Sundays. We use Zipcar a few times a year.

Most families around here have two cars, though there is a sizable minority with just one. I know no other car free families, though we do know a few who try to go car-lighter. There are a number of hard core bike commuters in our church, but only one family who bikes with their school age children (and they have a mini van on the side). It is common here to commute by train to downtown.

We have been car free from day one, ever since we got married in university with no drivers’ licenses. My husband has a license now, but I have never gotten around to learning to drive well enough. We have car-sat a minivan for the past two summers for friends who spent the summer in Europe and have only on street parking. It has been interesting to try it, but in the end not worth owning one.

We have done a lot of planning to build our car free life. My husband was in law school in Cambridge, where it is pretty easy to live carless. We don’t have family in the US so we could choose to live anywhere after graduation (or anywhere with big law to pay the loans). We needed it to not be too hot (south, DC) or too expensive (New York) and be good for being carfree, which narrowed it down to Chicago and Boston. We picked our suburb for the tree lined streets, real main street (complete with movie theater) and loads of families. We bought our first house recently and chose it specifically for being so close to our life (public transit, shopping, libraries). My first thought as I looked at a house was how it would work for the commute and the grocery shop. Three grocery stores are within an easy walk (20 minutes) with two more in under 40. Libraries, preschool and the Y are also easy walks as is that full main street. The amazing town pool is less than half and hour’s walk. We picked a preschool before the house and since we did not know exactly where we would be I ruled out several great schools because they could very well end up being just too far to give me any time off during the school day.

The cost of car free living for our family is missing things. We are not infrequently late for church because we just missed the train and have to wait 12 minutes for the next one. Every outing outside our normal fifteen minute walk zone takes more thinking and planning. Is it worth the effort? Planning the train/bus route, arrange the zip car, find a ride etc. rather than just getting in the car and going? We do miss things that we could do with a car easily. Some, like the zoo, are good things, others, like regular Target runs, we are probably better without.

And that is the other side of being car free; we don’t do too much because it is more work. I don’t go to Target every week and be mesmerized by the giant bulls eye. We don’t have activities every day because we cannot walk that much or that far, so we don’t get worn out, and we have enough down time. And we get to stop and smell the roses, gently touch the pumpkins, talk to people and count the rectangles. We walk through a rather dodgy part of Chicago to get to church and being on the ground, experiencing the kindness and friendliness of people makes us view it very differently than if we only looked at it from the car window. Oh, and my pants keep getting too big.

I am pretty sure I have not been on a bike since I was pregnant with my first child. We are stroller people. We have three, including a lightweight umbrella UppaBaby G-lite (the moped) for  travel and downtown with one child and a jogger (the race car/magical put the preschooler to sleep machine). The workhorse is my UppaBaby Vista (my Land Rover), both as a single and now with the extra seat or the wheelie board as a double. I literally wore the rubber off the tires in the first 20 months. I have replaced (mostly under warranty) several parts, bough just about every accessory and when the 2011 was on Zulilly upgraded to a new one. For the first few months as a double we had the kids both in seats facing each other. Monkey preferred the lower seat and liked to compare his feet to his sisters. After about two and a half he was happy on the wheelie board and that is how we have been getting around for most of the past year. He can even fall asleep standing on it with his head in Bee’s lap.

In winter, we do hooded fleece jackets, hats, mitts (when the stars align and they will stay on), fleece booties — all in a Bundleme, sometimes with a blanket inside. On super cold/windy days, I add the rain hood for a greenhouse effect.  This winter for standing on cold days, Monkey wore a one piece snowsuit (aka the Astronaut suit). He was always dressed warmly enough for his time on the preschool playground. In the summer when Bee was tiny, we would often go outside with her in the bassinet and a damp cloth over top to keep her cool and happy.

The Vista has a huge basket and I keep the footrest for the rumble seat in it to provide a more supported shelf. We can get 2 gallons of milk, 2 cartons of OJ and two big bags of groceries in it. We usually shop at Trader Joe’s and Monkey pushes the little cart around and we fill that up while I push the stroller. It is so easy not to have to get the baby in and out of anything.

Both kids love to sleep in the strollers. When Monkey was a toddler he could fall asleep in the stroller just sitting in the hall, no walk required. They can stay asleep in when we get home and I can leave the stroller in the hall, mudroom, or back yard (with a window open).  Bee often sleeps in the stroller from preschool drop off to pick up.

Posted in Going and staying carfree, Public transportation, True Life Stories of the Carfree, Walking | 4 Comments

Barriers to biking

Posted on June 18, 2012 by Nathan

When I talk to people about getting around more by bike, or any efforts to move towards less car dependence (but here the more relevant aspect is biking), I often say that even if things seem more inconvenient at first, you really can get to a place where life is more convenient, that it’s worth the effort to get over the initial barriers.

But for a long time, my own experience didn’t necessarily reflect that. Ever since I was about 18, with the exception of pregnancy, biking has been a primary mode of transit for me. For me, it’s always been a choice of more convenience, not less. I grabbed a bike when I was 18 because it got me where I was going faster than a bus. Even when I had a car, parking on my college campus was enough of a pain that I almost always chose to bike instead, and the times I didn’t, I regretted it.

But recently, due primarily to major changes in my commute, that calculation changed.

My neglected steed, not much to look at but perfect for parking downtown


Due to the vaguaries of academic life, as of September, my job moved from an easy 30 minute commute by bike or subway, to another city entirely that I get to (on the 3 days a week I go) by commuter rail. I didn’t get much choice in the matter, and after thinking through the resulting fallout, and what we could and couldn’t fit into our lives, we decided to make it work.

The whole thing is working way better than we expected, but my full commute takes about two and a quarter hours one way. I can work for the hour or so that I spend on the train, but it’s not really practical to work during my time on the subway to get to the train, or on the 15 minute walk (up a very VERY large hill) to my lab, so I still lose a fair amount of time. If I drove, I estimate that once parking time was taken into consideration, the trip would take about an hour and a quarter, involve an unpredictable amount of traffic, and that time would be completely lost for work, so for me, especially given how much I hate driving and absolutely love trains, dealing with the longer commute by rail is worth it (setting aside for a moment that we probably couldn’t afford to buy a car anyway).

But this isn’t a post about the commuter rail. With this shift in commute, I first attempted to ride downtown to catch my train at South Station. I thought it would be faster and more reliable than the subway, but in reality, at my usual pace with usual traffic, I found that biking added about 10 minutes to the trip. With a commute this long, that starts at 6:30 am, those 10 minutes mattered. A lot. Even worse was biking out of downtown at rush hour at the end of a 12 hour day, which took about 20 minutes longer than the subway, and was damned unpleasant.

It looked like my choice was a longer commute, including biking in downtown traffic at its worst, or a shorter commute where I got to sit on the subway reading my book. I picked the same thing most everyone would pick: reading my book on the red line.

This worked OK. We found our sea legs with this new schedule (H started kindergarten at the same time, so we also entered the realm of double drop-offs and double pick-ups for the kids, and the accompanying scheduling vaguaries of random half-days and scheduling after school care). Amazingly, the commute proved workable (especially because I don’t have to make it every day). But as the year wore on, the lack of biking and the resulting lack of exercise started to get to me. Sure, I was riding with the kids on the weekends and for drop-offs and pick-ups, but it wasn’t enough. I was getting antsy.

I knew I’d be happier and healthier if I bit the bullet and rode downtown. I’ve been riding forever, so of all people, I ought to have known how much better I’d feel, and of course I already knew that would be the easiest way to fit more exercise into my routine (add about 30 mins total to my round-trip commute 2-3 days a week, versus magically conjure 3-4 hours a week to do extra rides or go to the gym? Framed that way the choice is obvious).

But getting over the hurdle to put down my book, get off the subway, and get back in the saddle wasn’t easy. There was that ill-timed cough I get every winter, that seemed to last forever and that I’ve learned the hard way I have to sit out until it passes (or it lasts even longer). My commuting bike needed attention in order for me to make the ride and I’d put it off over the weekend. The alarm would go off at 5:30 instead of 6:00 and I just couldn’t do it.

But then a chance encounter helped things fell into place. I ran into a friend from the train, A. He and I had both been riding the commuter rail with bikes in the fall, and had occasionally said hello, but then our schedules shifted, and we hadn’t seen each other for a while. I saw him again, but without his bike, and asked if he was still riding. As it turned out he was, just not that day, and I told him about my frustration with the ride and knowing I should get going again. He mentioned that he had better luck biking to Back Bay instead of South Station. I have no idea why this hadn’t occurred to me before, but it hadn’t, and when I checked the route, indeed, it was much easier, with a lot less high traffic riding. It also gained me 5 minutes, because the train leaves Back Bay 5 minutes later than South Station.

That was enough of a possibility for improvement to get me off my duff, so a little over a month ago I gave my bike some love, set my alarm early, and started the day with a lovely ride on virtually deserted streets and along the Charles. Once I worked out the timing, it turned out I could leave my house at exactly the same time I left for the subway. The ride back out of Back Bay at the end of my long day was slightly less pleasant, but not miserable, and I didn’t lose nearly as much time as I had out of South Station.

There were still some inconveniences. I needed to pack a change of clothes. I needed to actually eat breakfast before I left in the morning because I couldn’t eat on the train. But I was over the hump. I was riding again. It feels good.

The whole thing was good reminder that the hurdles to fitting biking into life are very real. We often can’t see these hurdles, because we’ve solved our particular set of problems or are just used to some of the mild inconveniences. But a shift in the delicate balance of time and energy needed to get our family where we need to be was enough to tip the balance so that I didn’t just ride automatically. I had to actually try. It was nice to learn, again, how great it feels to start the day with a ride, and that I haven’t been lying when I tell people the effort really is worth it.

Posted in Benefits of being carfree, Biking, Cambridge and Boston area, Problems and issues, Public transportation | 3 Comments