Back on two wheels

Went to walk across frozen Trout Lake, along with most of Vancouver

Hello there & happy new year! Hope your holidays were fantastic, or at least not too stressful. We did a lot of sleeping in & eating sugary stuff. We also tried to take advantage of the actual proper Canadian winter that descended on Vancouver for the last five weeks & counting.

I am an all weather, all year round cyclist, partly because I like the challenge, but also because even when it's cold or wet, it's more convenient that transit & not painful like walking (on my arthritic hip) can be for me. But. Big but. We had to seriously cut back on biking once the fluffy, somewhat dry snow transformed into packed lumpy ice alternating with slush everywhere. #VikingBiking doesn't work that well here in Vancouver's wet winters. The iciness of the roads & the lack of control & respect from drivers kept even us off our bikes for most of December.

#BikeToSchool every damn day. Almost.

If I'd looked into the long term forecast in the beginning of December & imagined how what has turned out to be the longest cold snap in my lifetime would impact me, I'd have bought studded winter tires back then. But I didn't realize they'd be necessary until it was too late & they became a scarce commodity. Lesson learned for next year--I'm still hoping to find some near the end of the season for future use.

Aaaaaaaanyway, the winter seems to be fading a bit. It's still chilly today, but we haven't had a proper dump of snow  in over a week & the ice is finally melting on most sidewalks & side streets in our area. Which means we're back to riding most places again.

Thrilled to bike (not walk) this load home

This whole experience has really driven home how much cycling keeps me happy. I don't need to tell you about exercise & endorphins & all that--just the regular physical activity is obviously good for us. Biking keeps my body weight mostly off my hip joint, unlike walking, so it means a lot less pain, which has a huge impact on my mood. Getting out of the house, into the sun (vitamin D!) is beneficial just for a change of scenery. The bakfiets also makes getting groceries a lot easier--carrying bags of groceries while walking even a few blocks is a special kind of hell.

For a family, it's also a lot cheaper than driving or taking transit. For all of us to take transit on an outing now costs about $12, which really adds up if you're doing it most days of the week. tThen there's the kids' happiness to think about. Though they can walk quite far for their ages, the 6km round trip to Linny's school is too much for either of them. He seemed to enjoy the 45 minute walk with me the first day back at school, then day two? Oh, the whining. Too far, too cold, too fast, too slippery. If I can just pop him into the bakfiets & zip him to school in 15 minutes, we're all happier.

So here's hoping we won't have another month of actual winter & we'll get back to the balmy above zero dampness we're all used to here in Vancouver. See you on the bike paths!

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How Car Sharing & Family Biking Go Hand in Hand + ANNOUNCEMENT

Picking up a Modo car to visit family in Coquitlam

I was recently unlocking our bikes & was approached by a stranger who had questions about the bakfiets. This wasn't unusual, because we have people asking questions about both our cargo bikes all the time. He has two kids & is looking at replacing their Chariot trailer with a cargo bike to be their main family vehicle. They're already long time members of Modo The Car Coop, & don't own a vehicle, so he needs no convincing that a cargo bike would be worth the money.

What struck me after we spoke was that I've had similar conversations a lot lately. There are a lot of families out there who are discovering that it's just not necessary to spend all that money owning a car or two in Vancouver. I think the increasing popularity of cargo bikes is helping, but that's underpinned by the fact that car sharing in Vancouver has become mainstream.

When I started volunteering with Modo over a decade ago, I talked to a lot of people at various events to whom car sharing was a totally foreign concept. I honestly had many conversations where people just couldn't fathom how sharing cars worked, & I often got the impression that they thought we were a bit nuts.

Now, with over 2100 car sharing vehicles in Metro Vancouver & tens of thousands of members, everybody seems to understand what car sharing means. It feels like common knowledge that even if a family doesn't own a car, they can still get access to one as needed for trips out of the city, rainy days, furniture shopping, or sometimes just for fun.

Aaaaand here's the announcement:

If you'd like to see how carsharing works with biking & a family, watch for us on Instagram! I'm taking over Modo's account for a week starting today!

Disclaimer: As an Official Blogger Ambassador, Modo will be providing me with some driving credits & I'll be blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, & Instagramming about our adventures big & small with Modo. I've already been writing about carsharing for years, so if you've been following me for a while, expect more of the same!

To follow my Modo travels, & the other Modo Blogger Ambassadors (there are a few of us!) click on the hashtags #LetsModo & #MyModo & follow @Modo_CarCoop on Twitter, Instagram, & Facebook.

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Introducing a New Member of the Spokesfamily

Couldn't keep the kids out of the filthy box

Yup, we got another bike. I'm not going to say how many bikes we own now, but I will tell you it's in the double digits if you count the kids'. But this one is different, really! It's a Bakfiets, the original two-wheeled Dutch box bike.

We originally wanted to get this type of cargo bike way back when we started thinking about it, before we even had children. It wasn't a priority until we had two kids & the family biking gear we had just wasn't cutting it for Bronte & Linnaeus together. But having a single income in this expensive city meant we started looking at longtail cargo bikes, because they're generally less expensive than the longjohns. Bakfiets are still relatively rare here so they don't come on the used market very often, plus their resale value is generally quite high, so it was still less expensive to buy a new Yuba Mundo.

After having the Yuba for nearly two years, we still wanted to have a bakfiets. Not to replace the Yuba, but in addition to it. But it was a bit of a pipe dream, as we don't have a spare $7000 lying around. Unbeknownst to me, Oliver set up a Craigslist Alert for 'bakfiets' at least a year ago. Then it came. Early one morning, he got an email notifying him that someone in Richmond was selling a Bakfiets.nl for cheap! The catch was, the bike had been in a crash & was not rideable.

Cargo bike mechanic extraordinaire: Clint

Oliver emailed the guy immediately & we crossed our fingers, but expected not to be the first people to respond to the post. We'd been third a year or two ago when we'd noticed someone selling a bakfiets on Craigslist & missed out on it. But we heard back quickly--we were first! Oli arranged to meet the seller in Richmond, biking about 40 minutes to get there. He took a good look at the bike & bargained a bit with the guy. They loaded it into the seller's truck & drove it, & Oli's bike, back home.

I was so excited to have a bakfiets just pop up like this--the 'barn find' that we had been dreaming of--though a little nervous about fixing the bike up. It had clearly been in a collision, which bent the front forks back & to the side to the point the front wheel would not turn. The rest of the bike seemed in good shape, but I was still holding my breath until we could get Clint, our bike mechanic (he owns the bike side of Tandem Bike Cafe) to look it over.

I spent at least an hour cleaning the bike on the second day we had it. It took a lot of work, sweeping, vaccuuming & wiping all the dirt, dust, grease, paint, & sawdust. Under the layers of grime, the paint job was in great shape & the box only had a couple of scrapes & a couple bits of hardware missing. Then later that day, the guy we bought the bike from stopped by with what he thought was a part of the frame lock (it wasn't--must have been from a different bike) AND A RAIN CANOPY for the bakfiets! Considering what we paid for the bike, we weren't expecting this. Rain covers usually go for $350-450, so you can imagine how thrilled we were.

Beauty shot of the Bakfiets on the way home from school

Clint came over the next day to look over our bike & managed to 'cold fit' (aka bend using a chunk of pipe) the forks back to the point that the front wheel was freed & the bakfiets was sort of rideable. I say sort of, because it is still really wobbly & not really safe. But we each rode it around the block & it was amazing! The bike feels much lighter than it looks & even with the wonky fork, the steering wasn't that bad. The shifters (internal gear hub Nexus 8 speed) seem to work fine & the brakes are functional.

Love the full chain case: I can do maxi skirts!

I googled the brand, & found the only Canadian distributor of Bakfiets.nl: Urkai, in Burlington, Ontario. After a couple of phone calls with Marc of Urkai, I ordered a fork & some rubber feet for the kickstand, as it's missing one.

A few days later, the package arrived from Urkai & I immediately started pestering Clint. He fixed up the bike just a few days later, doing a full tuneup on it, even repairing the dynamo light system, & we had a fully functional Bakfiets!

It's been just over a week, but I've ridden this bike so much--school dropoff & pickup, errands, shopping--that it feels like longer. I'm still getting used to how a longjohn rides, compared to a longtail. They are definitely different beasts. I'll probably write more on that later--a full on comparison between the Yuba & Bakfiets.

For now though, we're all really in love with the new bike. The kids haven't been on the Yuba since we got the Bakfiets, they demand to ride in it every time we go anywhere. I was hoping to gradually get used to the heavier bike up hills with both kids, but I guess we're just going whole hog. I feel like I can see my quadriceps getting bigger each day. I'm going to have massively strong legs!

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CETMA Afternoon

We got to borrow the Tandem Bike Cafe CETMA for an afternoon!

Our Yuba Mundo shifters have been giving us some trouble for a while now so we finally took them in to Clint at Tandem Bike Cafe to figure out what was going on. He thought the internal mechanism was broken or missing some teeth from a gear, so they need to be replaced. We'd brought Bronte to the shop on the Yuba & I rode my "pretty bike", which carries only one person. Bronte needed her afternoon nap & we also had to pick up Linnaeus from school, so Clint offered to loan us his CETMA cargo bike for the afternoon.

I was pretty excited, I have to admit. I've test ridden Clint's CETMA Margo before, but only a few blocks. This time I got to ride it a few km home & then up to Linny's school, then back to Tandem again. The bike is about the same length as our Yuba Mundo, but handles very differently.

It's hard to get a selfie with a 9-foot-long bike

The Yuba feels more or less like a regular bike, but the CETMA rides differently for a few reasons. It has a small front wheel, which makes steering a bit twitchy at slow speeds, particularly starting from a stop. Also, the front wheel isn't directly under the handlebars like on most bikes, it has a long bar that connects the head tube with the front wheel: linkage steering. This makes the steering feel very slightly slower somehow. You can't see your front wheel with the big box in front, though that's the same as with the Yuba, as the Bread Basket obscures my view of the front wheel too.

A big advantage to the CETMA is whatever you load it with--in this case, one five-year-old--rides low in the box, which means it's actually more stable under load. When I use the Yuba GoGetter bags, they're a little higher up on the bike & the kids sit up on the rack, so with passengers, the centre of gravity is a lot higher.

I managed the hill up to Linny's school--it's a 41m elevation gain over 4km, so not steep, but a long haul--without trouble. The CETMA empty felt about the same as our Yuba with Linny on it. The gear range of the internal 7 (or 8?) speed hub is comparable to the Yuba, but the bike weighs a good 30 pounds more, mainly because of the wooden box & rain cover.

It rained a little for the ride up there, but because of the Blaqpaq rain cover acting like a faring, my legs stayed dry. When I got into the schoolyard to pick Linny up, I was surrounded by parents looking at the bike & asking questions. Quite a few families bike to school there, but only a couple are cargo bikers & they have longtails or midtails, nobody has a bakfiets like the CETMA.

Once I picked up Linny & he climbed into the box, we zipped downhill back to Tandem to return the CETMA & pick up the Yuba. Having a box bike for an afternoon definitely makes me certain that I want one. We're going to have to find the money somewhere this year, I think. I got to test out Clint's newest bakfiets, a Metrofiets, a few days later--I'll write about that one soon too.

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Cargo Bike Comparison: Longtail vs. Long John

Test driving a Larry vs. Harry Bullitt at the HUB Picnic

After getting to test drive a few front loading long john style bikes (I call them bakfietsen) recently at the HUB Member Picnic & the Mount Pleasant Family Biking Festival, I decided to add in a section in my Cargo Bike FAQs on the differences I see between the two styles.

I've been thinking about it a lot in the past couple of months because I am coveting another cargo bike--I'd love to have a bakfiets as well as our Yuba Mundo. They both have different strengths & weaknesses. I think if we added a bakfiets to our fleet--especially with an e-assist--it might make some of the cargo hauling runs we do that much easier & maybe even replace a few more of the Modo carshare bookings.

Pop over to my Cargo Bike FAQs if you'd like to take a look--in case you've already read the list before, the comparison is at the bottom.

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