Bikes As Transportation

Shawn’s Electric Yuba Mundo

2012-04-23T11:33:10Z

The author giving his touring bike a break

Today’s article comes from a guest contributor, Shawn McCarty of Venice, Florida. Shawn is an avid cyclist who has completed bike tours through various parts of the United States and Europe. His blog (aworldspinning.com) has some nice photos of his European adventure. And his custom electric cargo bike is amazing!

If you have biking facts, photos, or a story you think our readers would enjoy, let us know. We’re interested in presenting a variety of topics and points of view as we build our biking community.

From camels to e-cargo bikes

When I returned home after cycling over 5000 miles from Ireland to Morocco I no longer cared to own a car. What’s a bicycle trip to the grocery store if you have spent 5 months doing this?

The Funny American in Ireland

I resolved to be car free. I know my weaknesses and knew that when it got hot and muggy I would cheat. So I decided to build a bike that would not lead me to temptation, but deliver me from evil, especially when the Florida weather got hot.

My ecargo bike

An electric cargo bike would allow me to ride when it is hot, arrive decent, and carry everything. There would be no inner car/bicycle debate.

But this bike, to be a true car replacement vehicle, would need to travel 75 miles on a charge and tote a week’s worth of groceries and my girlfriend – all at the same time! My needs were more demanding than the products on the market could fulfill so I chose to assemble my bike.

I bought a Yuba Mundo frame with panniers and a front basket. I used a Ping 36-volt, 30-amp battery and a Golden Hub Motor that I have had on several other ebikes. I bought new Schwalbe Fat Frank tires. They are cushy and support 330 pounds per tire. I used a 7-speed internal hub that I had on another bike, and a 3-gear chain-ring in front. I added a car headlight sized 2200-lumen LED front light from Super Bright LEDs, and an LED truck flasher on the back. I converted the voltage to power the LED lights from 36 to 12 using a Green Galaxy Dc to Dc converter from Thunderstruck motors. The lights burn just 20 watts and add enormous visibility and safety. I use a Cycle Analyst as an energy gauge, and find it invaluable.

Rear light, a truck LED flasher

Front light from Super Bright LEDs

The battery compartment

The battery weighs 25 pounds and is mounted in the front basket. It helps balance out the weight when the tail of the bike is loaded. I would have preferred to mount the battery lower, but I needed extra space to carry a larger battery. Because the Yuba front basket does not turn with the handlebars, the weight is not noticeable once underway, and I can even ride with my hands off the handlebars. The front “hood” has proven to have other benefits, as there is plenty of space in there to manage the wiring and to store small valuables.

Hood open showing controller, battery management system, light switch, on/off switch, fuse, and 36- to 12-volt converter

Board lifted showing Ping batteries

One problem with the Yuba Mundo is that there is no place for adult passengers to put their feet with the panniers attached. So I built a couple of fold-out aluminum “wings” as heel rests. Later I will make a set of stirrups! Also, because the bag bottoms extend beyond their floor, the bags tend to slide outwards, pivoting from their top mounts. I put some small holes in their sides and zip tied them to the frame.

Cost efficient transportation

How efficient is it? At 6 cents per kilowatt hour, burning 15 watts a mile, an ecargo bike will travel 3200 miles, across the USA, for under $3.00. A 10-mile jaunt will cost less than a penny. Because of their low energy requirements, they can be easily charged by photovoltaics. Just connect whenever the bike is at home and your ride is powered by the sun. I once carried 380 pounds of golf cart batteries for my home photovoltaic system on my ecargo bike! How Green is that?

In addition, all the pleasures of cycling are yours when you ride an ecargo bike; the wind in your face, being outdoors, taking routes that cars don’t frequent, moving at a relaxed pace, the mild exercise. An ecargo bike still allows you to pedal as hard and go as fast as you can. You can ride with the motor on or off. But with cruise control and regenerative braking (like a Prius), you can also relax if you want a break.

It is nearly as fast as a car for short errands, say an eight mile round trip. Like cycling, you ride different routes, smaller streets, take all the shortcuts, ride bike trails and cut through grass. Whee!

On longer trips, say 50 miles round trip, it takes about twice as long as driving. The bike spends less time sitting at lights relative to the time spent moving, and hence is closer to the trip time of a car then you would think. At stoplights, the bike goes to the front of the line. Still, I sometimes get impatient. So I ask myself: How much time would it take for a workout and to earn money for gas, insurance, registration, car repair and a car payment?

Safety

Statistics show that cycling is very safe. I have ridden on several multi-month tours, and have never even had a close call. The data and statistical analysis firm Failure Analysis Associates, now Exponent, did a study of fatality rates:

Remember that these statistics include children on bicycles. Riding defensively with foresight of how drivers might behave, using lights and a safety vest for visibility, using a rear view mirror, riding courteously and obeying the traffic laws, all push the odds even further in your favor.

And what about the health benefits of the exercise? According to Pedaling Health, an Australian publication, a person who bicycles six hours a week reduces his chance of death by coronary heart disease alone by over four times as much as he increases his chance of death through a traffic accident.

Mayer Hillman of the British Medical Association has estimated that the total health benefit of cycling is twenty times the risk. The risk of pulmonary heart disease is 1000 times greater than the risk of death from cycling, and 3000 miles a year on a bike would go a long way towards preventing it!

Just for the fun of it

Now I’m always looking for opportunities to ride. I am reminded of when I first got my driver’s license. I was always asking my mom if she needed anything at the store:

Mom, do we need a loaf of bread?
No.
How about a half gallon of milk?
No!
How about canned ravioli? I don’t see any…. Give me the car keys, I’ll go get some for you!

Grocery shopping in Venice, Florida

Computer Lab by Bike

2012-04-23T11:31:34Z

Today I got to combine a couple of my interests: cargo cycling and e-waste recycling. Almost five years ago I helped found Richmond, Indiana’s Hardware Co-op. The Hardware Co-op is a re-use and recycling program for e-waste. The project has operated at a fairly small scale until the last year, when we’ve been attracting more donors and volunteers. Today the project had our first event presence– a booth at the local Earth Day celebration.

Our booth consisted of a thin-client demo lab, which showed how some systems from the Windows-98 era can be made to perform at modern speeds. It works by sending most processing to a server, like the old mainframe systems with “dumb terminals”.

Using the Bikes-at-Work trailer seen the background of the photo above, I carried over 3 desktop systems, a laptop, a 32 inch display and some other supplies. While our booth was effectively two blocks from a parking lot, I was able to roll the trailer through the door and right up to our booth. Had I carried the equipment by car, several trips back and forth to the car would have been required to get all the equipment inside.

Cargo-cycling and recycling have been a good match for in the past few years. Below are some more photos of computers-by-bike that I’ve taken.

A weekend of family biking firsts

2012-04-10T01:31:07Z

On Saturday morning my 4 year-old got to take her first ride on the back of our Xtracycle, using stoker bars instead of a kid seat. She loved it. That was no suprise, but I enjoyed it more than I thought as well.

I expected it to feel more loosey-goosey without the constraint of the seat, but it actually felt more stable and easier to ride. I’m guessing that’s due to three factors: First, the weight of the seat has been subtracted, and replaced with some rather light handlebars. Second, her weight had dropped about 6 inches, lowering our center of gravity. Third, I expect her ability to lean side-to-side more may have contributed to a more natural feel. We’ll continue to use a kid-seat for her on our electric Yuba Mundo, but I expect we’ll use the stoker bars for most trips on the Xtracycle now.

I didn’t get a good direct shot of this ride, but here she is in the background, as we rode to see off a Warm Showers guest, Dominic from One Bike One World. Warm Showers is a hospitality site for touring cyclists.

Later in the morning, I hauled my first big load of plants on the Xtracycle. My wife unexpected acquired some garlic, onions, daylilies and cat nip at a community garden. There was capacity to spare on the Xtracycle, with room left my daughter to still ride on the deck and hold on to her handlebars.

The open, waterproof design of the Freeloader bags made the remaining dirt easy to dump and spray out.

On Sunday, we had another first: both the children on the Xtracycle!

I had a favorable first-impression of trying this as well. The second child felt more like an incremental increase in required effort, rather than doubling. We took a detour on the way home to ride on the Cardinal Greenway some. All three of us enjoyed the ~4 mile trip without any breakdowns.

Finally, here’s one thing that didn’t change this weekend: When my wife’s using her electric assist, I still can’t catch her, even when she’s carrying two kids. It’s not such much that her top speed is faster, is that her average speed is faster.

So, instead of getting a photo of her en-route with two kids, I had to settle for shot when she had finally stopped and I had a chance to catch up:

If you are looking to ride more or improve your fitness, consider buying your spouse an electric cargo bike and trying to keep up!

Biking with kids: crashing and learning

2012-04-02T16:07:08Z

Yesterday I wrote about my 4 year old’s success with her first cross-town bike trip. I closed with a promise to tell the story of her ride with an unfortunate ending the day before.

Here’s that story, with more thoughts on kids and bike crashes.

We had ridden about 1.5 miles uneventfully through Richmond to drop off a package at the Post Office. A Cardinal Greenway trailhead is practically behind the Post Office, so we proceeded to ride up to Springwood Lake Park. Heading home, she had ridden just over 4 miles when she was suddenly thrown over the handlebars in a tangle of body and bike.

It seemed like the safest of conditions: She was on a flat stretch of paved trail, with no one else close to her (except for me following her). I soon found there had been a singular rock on the trail– a golf ball-sized stone that had a similar color to the pavement. She impacted the front of her helmet. I think she would have had no injury at all, except she had recently bumped and bruised her forehead on a fall while she was running. This time the helmet pressed against the bruise and made it hurt.

I had not had the foresight to bring a kid seat on my bike to carry her home, so her bike trip ended there and she got picked up in mom’s car.

This was not her first crash in her relatively short history of learning to ride a bike.

She once went down a grass hill a little too fast and went over the handlebars when they twisted to the side. Another time she slid out going too fast around a gravel corner on a sidewalk. While these are always hard to watch, they are valuable lessons to have had at low speeds when the consequences have been minimal and parents have been nearby. Her response is always is to return and try again. As a result, her riding style has already been tempered to be more aware and moderate: she looks out for gravel, slows down for turns, and brakes going down hills to keep herself at a safe speed.

I was not as fortunate to learn about gravel in turns under such safe conditions. I really “got it” in my early twenties when I took a sharp turn off a well-traveled street at full speed. I went down hard and fast at more like 20 miles per hour, and had no one around to help scrape myself and my road rash out of the street before the next car might come. Fortunately, the intersection was empty at the moment.

As a parent, I can’t remove the risks of cycling for my child. I can help create an environment where the stakes are lower, and support and encouragement are available to recover from the mistakes and accidents that are bound to happen.

For my daughter, the risks must be worth it, as she continually asks to go out and ride. I think she’s developing rapidly as a cyclist because of her early failures and accidents, rather than in spite of them.

For more on young children and bicycles, I recommend the post Start ‘em Young by Henry Cutler, as well as the Totcycle blog, particularly, Is Family Cycling Safe?.

What are you thoughts on kids and bike crashes?

First cross-town bike ride, 4 years old

2012-04-02T01:30:02Z

Last Sunday my daughter rode her own bike across town to church for the first time. She recently turned four, and made the 3 mile trip on her bike with 12 inch wheels. It was her idea to try that day, and she was indeed ready.

With plenty of practice already with shorter trips and riding on trails, we made the trip together on the city sidewalks, stopping at all the alleys and streets to check for traffic, and wait for dad’s signal to go.

She handled the trip well in terms of behavior and skills. We averaged about a 4 miles per hour on the sidewalk, so the trip took 45 minutes– about twenty minutes “extra” for the experience.

Sections of the sidewalk were frustrating for me with the frequent stopping, but other times there would be a long block without driveways crossing to check out. In those moments, it was like a little stretch of private bike trail through the city. (I don’t recall passing any pedestrians at all on the trip…).

While this trip went well, our ride the day before had an unfortunate ending. I’ll write more about that tomorrow. (See one more ride photo after the jump)

An evening of biking with the children

2012-03-31T02:21:05Z

I’m blessed that both my young children enjoy bicycling. My four year old daughter now rides her own bike on 3 to 4 mile trips on sidewalks and trails. The 10-month old simply enjoys the experience… and the naps.

My daughter’s behavior is mysteriously good on her bike outings. Just as video games can foster addiction by providing a series of small successes, I think sidewalk-biking is also working to build confidence and self-esteem. At each block or alley, she successfully stops, checks traffic, and waits for the signal to go- she’s “cleared a level”. There’s also encouragement for good hill climbing and careful braking when going down hill.

On this day, we found ourselves returning home at dusk with a large red sun on the horizon. and captured the photos above and below.

In the photo above, I gave her a cue to cross the empty intersection to get one from sidewalk to the other. Below, the little one enjoyed playing with a micro hula hoop with hands and feet before he dozed off on the bakfiets.

Costs and Planning for a Car-Lite Family of Four

2012-03-30T15:31:44Z

No Virtue Required: Car-Lite Family Transportation Is Less Expensive, Faster, and More Flexible than Car-Encumbered Transportation

In his recent post, my co-blogger Don writes about “the virtue in choosing the right [transportation] tool for the job”. I realized that my own family makes regular use of five, count ‘em FIVE transportation options: walking; bicycling; busing; driving various CarShare and rental vehicles; and (in dwindling amounts) driving my wife’s tiny red Mini. Yesterday epitomized our highly flexible family transportation: we criss-crossed Ithaca together and separately and then at the end of the day we all landed together on our couch like the opening sequence of a Simpson’s episode.

I also realized that my family’s transportation methods do not require any sort of virtue other than doing what’s sensible. A brief analysis of our vehicles and our route, below, shows that using car-lite transportation methods made our errand-running significantly faster and less expensive than car-heavy transportation. Our travels yesterday made me realize something else I take for granted: we’re able to travel together when we want to but we can just as easily travel separately too. A car forces you to all go the same place at the same time. Believe me, car-lite is not about making sacrifices. Its about making the leap to better family transportation. Care to try it yourself? In the fall I’d like to offer car-lite workshops at the Friends Bike Clinic in Ithaca. If you don’t live in Ithaca, check out these online resources.

Our Vehicles of Choice

Our Route

Step 1: In the morning we obediently headed out to our workplaces. My wife (red) walked one mile to work at Cornell University. At this point I can hear y’all thinking “Gosh its too bad I live too far from work to walk. You are so lucky.” Luck had nothing to do with it. It’s no accident that my wife can walk to work. When we were buying a house in Ithaca 15 years ago we got out a map and placed a compass point on her office. We drew a one-mile radius around her office and only considered houses within that radius. I (green) walked three feet from my bedroom to my office. I have very intentionally shaped my career as a web designer so that I can work at home. Lastly my daughter (orange) took the bus 2 miles to school and my son (purple) walked 1.7 miles to school.

Step 2. In the afternoon I biked to Cornell to help my wife with a web design project. I took our folding bike. Although it is one mile straight uphill, my bike has an electric motor that helped carry me to my destination without sweating and in less than seven minutes. Driving and walking from the parking lot would have taken me 20 minutes and cost $3. After a productive meeting my wife and I walked a few blocks to a CarShare car. We put the folding bike in the back of the CarShare car and then drove to my son’s high school to watch him perform in a student debate.

Step 3. I needed to leave the debate early, so I unfolded my bike and headed home. At home I loaded up my electric cargo bike with over 100 lbs. of tools for a bike repair clinic I am putting on at Ithaca College. In the meantime my wife and son used the CarShare car to pick up my daughter from a babysitting gig. Then they all went out to a restaurant.

Step 4. My wife dropped off the kids and the CarShare car and then walked a few blocks home. I biked down South Hill from Ithaca College and we all met at home.

How do our travels on this day compare to those of a hypothetical (but all too common) family that travels solely by car? Here’s a quick cost analysis. My car-lite family spends about $40/month on CarShare and $400/month on our Mini. (Since we drive less than 7,500 miles a year and we lease the Mini, our costs are less than average.) Owning and operating our electric bikes costs us an additional $50/month. My daughter’s bus pass costs an additional $7/month. My son’s and my wife’s walking doesn’t cost anything. Total: $497/month.

How do the costs add up for the car-encumbered family? First of all they would need two cars, one for each parent, to achieve the same goals. Typical car ownership and operating costs for two cars is $1,200 a month, and perhaps more if you account for various cascading hidden costs such as the need to buy a house with a two-car garage and the need to live farther from town to accommodate such a house and the commute time needed to live farther from town etc. Secondly, my wife would need to park on campus, which can cost as much as $65 a month. I would need to drive my kids to school. Driving them would take about an hour out of every workday which I value at $20/hour, so that adds up to $400/month. Lastly, every time they drove to Cornell and parked there it would cost them $3, so five trips would cost $15/month. Total: $1680/month. Ouch. Over three times as much money.

Here’s a quick speed analysis. People may assume that driving is always faster, but traveling by bike and on foot can often be faster over distances of a mile or two. Motorists get stuck in traffic, they can’t always take direct routes, and they have to find and walk from parking rather than traveling door-to-door. For example our neighborhood has a pedestrian bridge that allows my wife a direct route to work; motorists have to go a half mile around the creek to get across. And the main parking lot on campus is actually farther from her office than our house. To be fair, my car-lite family does have to wait for buses and travel a few blocks to and from the CarShare cars. We also have to suffer through such stresses as experiencing the weather and nature and having to exercise. Then again, aren’t nature and exercise the very sorts of things the car-encumbered family needs to seek out by driving to the park or driving to the gym? We’ve found transportation happiness and I wish the same happiness for everyone.

Solving the casserole-by-bike problem

2012-03-20T00:58:48Z

I had this large dish of fresh pasta to deliver to a friend. How to carry it to a bike? It’s not a good match for a bungee treatment. The plastic lid would collapse and the aluminum pan would get distorted. It needs to stay flat so it’s not spilled. Yuba’s Bread Basket works great for this kind of load.

I had first tried a regular milk crate on a different bike, but the milk crate was too small. Other solutions to the casserole-by-bike problem could have included using an oversided milk crate as seen here:

A load like this could also be carried by using the box in a bakfiets-style bike. A trailer could be used, but it seems like overkill for a large dish of pasta!

What’s your favorite way to carry large flat spill-prone food dishes on a bike?

First week with a Bobike Mini: two kids on a longtail cargo bike

2012-03-18T01:14:41Z

Our son is now old enough to sit up on a bike. With our first child, we had one bike that was able to carry children, a bakfiets. Now we have a choice between a Big Dummy, and Yuba Mundo as well as the bakfiets.

Considering that the older child now weighs 40 pounds, I was particularly interested to try out riding two children on the electric Yuba Mundo. The assist increases the range and reduces the effort.

My wife reports that the new setup is notably easier. She has taken the bakfiets before with both kids– to drop off the 4-year old at day care. On the electric Yuba Mundo, she reported that the same trip was definitely easier, and took about the same amount time as a car.

Our challenge to address with the BoBike Mini will be napping. On the bakfiets, we used Sleep Dog to rest a napping head on.

We are considering buying a headrest for the BoBike Mini. However, as the Rideabye Baby post on Totcycle points out, the little sleeper can still miss the headrest by nodding off to the side.

Are there other solutions we should be considering?

One compatibility note: the foot rests of the BoBike Mini bumped into our Bread Basket accessory, so we had to choose one or the other. It has not turned out to be such a big deal to switch between them. The BoBike has a quick release that leaves only a small collar on the bike. When I wanted to deliver a big pan of fresh pasta to a friend, it took just a few minutes to remove the BoBike seat, and tighten the four bolts that hold the Bread Basket on.

Some more photos from the week follow.

Transportation: All Options on the Table!

2012-03-11T04:00:11Z

Don on Hammer Truck

For the past couple of years, it has been my habit to begin each New Year with a status update on my blog. In past updates, I’ve described how my cargo bike lifestyle is developing, how the cargo bike market is growing, and I’ve even tried to predict what the young year might bring. In moments of wild optimism, I’ve declared “this is the year of the electric cargo bike!”

My annual update is a little late this year, partly due to the extra effort needed to coordinate with Mark and Larry to bring our combined super-blog online. I think you’ll agree the time was well-spent. I’m personally quite excited about it, because the frequent contact with kindred spirits makes me feel less solitary in my pursuit of more efficient, more environmental, and more humanitarian transportation. Even better, I will now have more time to write instead of spending hours on the more mechanical aspects of maintaining a web blog. (Mark and Larry are both more blog-savvy than I, although I hope to do my part!)

It’s ironic that I’m riding my cargo bike less now than in previous updates. That’s mostly because I started a new job at the University of Washington (I write software to analyze data collected from mass spectrometers), and my commute takes me across a floating bridge that has no bike lane. There are beautiful bike lanes on Seattle’s other floating bridge, but it’s a pretty long ride (about 3 hours round-trip!) Instead, I walk a couple of miles and take the bus.

That brings me to the title of today’s article. I now find myself using many different transporation options depending on trip distance, speed, and number of people accompanying me. The cargo bike is the most satisfying (definitely the most exhilirating!), but other modes have their place:

Walking works well for short distances without the overhead of locking the bike and worrying about its security.
The bus is a great time to catch up on podcasts and/or sleep!
Our solar-powered Leaf is only a small improvement in the sea of cars on our roads, but it’s handy when kids and gear need to be transported greater distances to music lessons and gymnastics practice.

If you’re wondering why I’m using your valuable time to enumerate my transportation choices, it’s because I think there’s virtue in choosing the right tool for the job. Although many Americans have a choice of options, most are content to use their cars for every trip. We have a car mono-culture, and like mono-cultures in agriculture or thought or politics, it’s fragile (vulnerable to swings in the price of oil), imbalanced in its use of resources, and frankly, it’s boring! It’s empowering to have freedom of choice when I need to get somewhere. Sitting in my single-occupant car in a traffic jam is the opposite of freedom.

I hope that the words I write here will help improve the world, and I’m encouraged by emails I’ve received from numerous people. But my actions have power as well. Many friends and neighbors have seen me riding my bike or walking to the bus stop, and suddenly the light dawns: “I could try that too!” One woman I know thought she might drive across town so she could get on the bus at my stop, just to see how it’s done. That first ride on public transportation is really that intimidating! I wish there were some way we could lower the barrier.

Making a choice at odds with the car mono-culture is simultaneously difficult and liberating.