Cargo kids

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Our family ….

This is the first post on my new blog. I’m just getting this new blog going, so stay tuned for more. Subscribe below to get notified when I post new updates.

Let me first of all introduce myself and the reasons for this blog, I am Sarah, I’m on the good side of 40 and live with my partner and our three young children, 8 months, 4 years, and 6 years. I didn’t ever intend on having 3 children (if you had told me in my 20s that I would end up with 3 children I would have fallen over laughing) but it turns out love having kids and here I am a proud mum of 3. The pre-kids me used to enjoy cycling, in fact when I was pregnant with my 1st I did a charity cycle – read about it here : http://lejog4mentalhealth.blogspot.com/ . However, as the years passed I found I just don’t have the time to dedicate to cycling any more.

I have always thought of myself as a fairly green minded person and having three children definitely is not a particularly green choice. So to try to reduce the negative effect that our children will might have on the planet we want our family to lead a greener cleaner lifestyle. Which brings us to this blog. It is really a record of how we are going to transition to a greener lifestyle. With the starting point of the purchase of a cargo bike.

Why blog? Well, I hope that by blogging about our use of a cargo bike that I might reach others that use cargo bikes, or encourage those that drive their kids around to consider using a cargo bike. In particular I want to highlight in this blog how we made the choice, and the ups and downs of using a cargo bike.

Ideas to encourage others to ditch the car

We live in Stirling, Scotland and I haven’t seen anyone else with a cargo bike. Some parents have trailers and some have baby bike seats. However, from my observations, from those that live too far to walk they their children to school by car. This, I think is due to a variety of reasons. Stirling does not have particularly good cycle routes to schools. This means that many parents and children would be forced to use the road, and many would not feel safe cycling on the roads around Stirling.

Sustrans report on some of the barriers people face when considering cycling in Stirling. They found that only 36% of people in Stirling feel safe cycling, and that figure reduces to just 16% for child safety when cycling.

Source : https://www.sustrans.org.uk/media/2943/bike_life_stirling_2018.pdf

However, despite these barriers some are prepared to cycle. Some, are lucky like me, and they have relatively safe routes that they can cycle on. I believe that if more parents started considering cycling as an option, then it would shine a spotlight on the barriers faced by cyclists and hopefully en masse we could put pressure on the council to invest in safer cycle routes around Stirling.

Schools

With this in mind, I am hoping to promote cargo biking to parents at schools. We have had lots of positive comments about our Cargo bike from other parents. So I’ve now arranged a meeting with our school. Wha I would like to do, is arrange an afternoon to bring the Cargo bike to school, and arrange for other parents with bike seats and trailers to come to the school too. So that parents can have a look, also perhaps try it out. A comment that I get from parents regularly is about the difficulty in pedaling. However, what most don’t realise is that on the flat, is is relatively easy to pedal and does not require a high level of fitness.

If any readers have had experience running an event like this, I would love to hear from you. Or if any readers have any other ideas, please do either message me or add a comment. I will update the blog following my meeting.

Baby seat update

So my last post was about fitting a baby seat, and I mentioned that we were going to fit it at the weekend well…..we didn’t get round to fitting it on the weekend. I wish we had, because yesterday ended up being quite eventful. I was on drop off and pick up duty for school and nursery, my partner had taken the car but I had it all planned out, I would pick up my eldest two from school with the cargo bike. Then take them to a friends house after school and use my normal bike with weeride baby seat to pick up our baby from nursery. https://www.weerideuk.co.uk/Weeride_Deluxe_ltd.asp

However, I received a phone call whilst at work. Not long before I finished to be told our little baby was not well and I needed to pick her up (luckily she is fine, nothing to worry about!). However, this presented a transport issue. We had not fitted the baby seat to the cargo bike. I had the cargo bike at work, and I had roughly about 45 minutes to pick our baby up and get to the school. I decided that the only way this was going to be possible was to pick her up with the cargo bike and no baby seat, then go home and try to do a botched job of putting the baby seat in.

Putting a baby in a cargo bike with no seat : This is not something i would recommend, I definitely do not get best parent of the world for this. However, I did manage it. I did not really cycle though, I just sat her on the seat, and strapped her in as best I could.

Putting a bike seat in without properly attaching it : Again not something I would recommend, but time was running out – so I managed it. I moved the seat across that the girls normally sit on and used the straps to secure it in place as best as I could.

our melia baby seat, poorly secured in with the random things that seem to collect in our cargo bike 🙂

Making the time to fit the seat properly : This has to happen this weekend, so hopefully I will update with a much more informative post covering how we fitted the seat.

Baby seat for cargo bike

When we bought the cargo bike, it was with the intention of being able to transport our three children around. However, we are now a few months in and we still have not put our 8 month old baby into the bike.

Much as our littlest one is very good at sitting up, the seat belts provided with the Cargo bike are not particularly good, and they certainly could be wriggled out of very easily. So, we have started looking at baby bike seats. The main ones that we looked at were the Babboe bike seat ( https://www.babboe.co.uk/cargo-bike-accessories/toddler-seat ), and the Melia bike seat ( https://hollandbikeshop.com/en-gb/bicycle-trailers/melia-baby-safety-seat/melia-baby-safety-seat-7-18-months/melia-bicycle-trailer-infant-sling-comfort-aron-8-18-months/ ). Both of which we felt were quite expensive.

We went to our local bike charity, recyke a bike and had a lenghty discussion about if it might be possible to make our own out of other bike seats/car seats. Whilst I think this could be done, we are probably not the people to do it. So we resigned ourselves to buying a bike seat.

We kept an eye on all the places that second hand items turn up, ebay, facebook marketplace and gumtree. As luck would have it, we found someone selling one in milton keynes and the lady was happy to post it.

It arrived yesterday……and we have yet to fit it. So we are hoping to fit it this weekend.

If anyone reading has any experience of this baby seat or any tips…. Please do comment on this post.

Cargo fun ride

When I go to pick up the kids from school I get many funny looks. Our kids are the only kids that travel to school in one. The comments from other kids have been very positive. “wow, look at that”…..”mummy can we get one”…..”how cool”. So an unexpected benefit of the cargo bike has been teaching my kids that it is OK to be different. They always want to do the same S everyone else but the bike is teaching them otherwise.

One day earlier this week my kids asked if I could bring their scooters to school, so that after school they could play with their friends in the playground. Luckily the cargo bike is big enough to easily carry the scooters. I had to bring the bike into the playground and this attracted a lot of attention and some kids starting asking for a shot.

So I ended up taking the kids in groups of 4 around the playground. Well at least I now know that I can manage 4!

Are you considering a Cargo Bike?

This post will probably change and adapt and I may turn it into a page. However, I wanted to add something here whilst these thoughts are fresh in my mind.

There are many different types of Cargo bike and I definitely do not claim to be the authority on which types are best. However, what I can tell you is what I have learned about our cargo bike and how that may inform a decision about the type to choose.

Steering a three wheeler – our bike has two wheels at the front and one at the back. This means that the steering is a little odd at first, but I very quickly adapted. The video below shows how to turn on a Cargo bike

Examine the terrain – Using a three wheeled Cargo bike means that on uneven surfaces, as the video above demonstrates, the cyclist needs adjust body position/weight accordingly. This is ok, but it is worth examining the route that you will be using your cargo bike on. If the surfaces are uneven, or the road has high positive camber then you might want to consider a two wheeled Cargo bike that (I would imagine) would handle these different surfaces better.

The route that I take our kids to school is a fairly quiet road. The first time I went out on the cargo bike I tried to cycle on the path next to the road (I was a little nervous about going on the road at first). However, the path was very uneven and I found the cargo bike a little difficult to manage on the path.

Is your route flat? I find the cargo bike surprisingly easy to cycle – given the weight, especially full of kids. However, there is at one point on my journey a very slight incline and I really do feel the burn in my legs as I peddle up. If you are going to be cycling a very hilly route, an electric cargo bike might be a better option.

Traffic – is the route that you take busy? If so, then you might want to consider an electric cargo bike. I find that I cannot cycle particularly fast, and I certainly do not cycle fast away from a junction. If I had to cycle on busier roads, I would only do so if I had an electric assist bike.

Maintenance – I do not have a lot of know how when it comes to bike maintenance. If you are buying a bike for commutes, I would suggest considering about how it is going to be maintained. We are very lucky to have recyke-a-bike close to where we live. So, if we require help with maintenance we can get help at a reasonable price.

Getting our cargo bike

When our family grew from 4 to 5, we quickly realised that our small Honda Jazz wasn’t really big enough. We were…. with a bit of shoving and door slamming able to fit two child seats and a baby seat in the back. However, 3 child seats would be a definite no no. Breaking point came when we wanted to take my mum out for her birthday and wondered how we were going to get her to the restaurant, strapping her to the roof wasn’t really a viable option. So we decided to get a new car, and ended up with an old (we have never actually had a new car!) Citreon picasso 7 seater. Much as this car fits our needs, I started to think and think about the effect that this was having on the environment. With the short school run (we live too far from the school to walk) twice a day, trips to the shops etc. It didn’t sit well with me, and that is when I started researching cargo bikes. After some discussion with my partner we spoke to the local cycle hub and they had a couple of cargo bikes and said we could borrow one to try it out. This was fantastic news, we could try before we buy.

Stirling Cycle Hub 1st Anniversary- Image by Brian Smith on Flickr CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The cycle hub have a bike library, giving the opportunity to the public to borrow a cargo bike : http://www.stirlingactivetravelhub.org/bikelibrary/ I would recommend trying out a cargo bike first, there are a few things worth considering before you buy. However, we did not end up borrowing a cargo bike, just a week before we were due to borrow the cargo bike one was being sold second hand on gumtree.

I had been searching online for a cheap cargo bike for sometime, but nothing much seemed to be coming up in Scotland. Many 2nd hand bikes were for sale down in London and surrounding areas, but none in Scotland. The bike that we found is a Bakfiets Troy Cargo bike. See here for details : http://bimasbikes.com/troy-bakfiets.html

First cycle with 2 children on the cargo bike. Not quite mastered how to put the cover on the bike in this picture 🙂

We went to a nearby town to pick up the bike and took it for a test ride – without kids. It seemed very difficult to steer, but I figured I would get used to it. So we took the plunge and bought the bike.