Trackstanding a cargobike
February 8th, 2010MrsMekon started a blog for her Madsen at Mummy Bikes. I’ve been tweaking her bike, and after adding some Marathon Plus tyres, I took it out for a spin with my son (in the background on his Islabike). It handles really nicely, and is exceptionally easy to trackstand. Pretty much impossible to bunnyhop though.
Oh, and the flashing pedals aren’t a camera artifact; they’re Pedalites.
Who loves bakfietsen?
January 8th, 2010
I’ve notice that traffic to this site ebbs and flows pretty much independently of what content I put up, and that it’s definitely related to the seasons the latitudes that Western Europe / North America share. If it’s cold, less traffic basically. I have been playing with Google’s realtime search toys, and this lead me to Google Trends and Google Insights for search. Now, I suspect someone else will tell me how dumb I am being in interpreting this, and the results vary by trends vs insight, but it looks like the phenomenon I see in the traffic to this site is reflected in searches, if not content generation.
Trends also tells you where (simplification alert) the people who do the searches are located. For bakfiets, the Dutch are ahead by miles. The top 10 cities are all Dutch, which is to be expected (go Middelburg or The Hague, depending on who you believe). However, in terms of regions, the UK lags in 5th behind Beligium, Switzerland and Germany, and the US follows in 7th behind France. Is there a big bakfietsen scene in those countries or is it a language thing I am ignorant of?
Lastly, you can look at related searches. There’s not enough data for the UK or USA, but it appears that the low price Babboe trike is generating a lot of interest.
Pramformers, bicycles in disguise
December 28th, 2009I mentioned De FietsFabriek’s detachable-bak bakfiets last summer, and it turns out I missed the video above. It reminds me of the Zigo Leader that I rode back to back with the Taga, except the design looks somewhat less well resolved. For a start, no front brake that I can see, so not for export. Second, where do you store the front bike section whenusing the bak? The Zigo hides the front wheel under the front section. Lastly, I thought that the Taga had the prize for worst object pretending to be a useable pram all sewn up, but no. This is awesome; a wheelbarrow to take your kids round the shops in.
That all said, notwistanding its raincover, I do miss our old De FietsFabriek. The build quality was incredbile, and the ride was luxurious. They’ve not had a UK distributor for a while, but my guess is that that will change.
First roundup for a while…
December 23rd, 2009Work, home and putting a Madsen KG271 together (more to come) have kept me off the web pretty much, but thanks to Twitter and the various cargoists on there, a few things have caught my eye in the last month:
via @Amsterdamize
via @convenientcycle
Cargobike Gallery via @totcycle
Tom’s Cargobikes show you how to build your own. Via @austinon2wheels via @metrofiets
I hate cargobikes
December 8th, 2009I saw this funny video from Radio Netherlands on the Workcycles group on Facebook. Rather than putting people off, I thought it made a pretty good case for bakfietsen, and I loved how the representative of the Dutch Cyclist Union (Fietserbond, I think) immediately said that the authorities need to widen cycle paths, rather than blame the bikes.