Category Archives: reviews

January 25, 2012 · 12:19 pm

Legoland California

Legoland from the Sky Cruiser

Our son is old enough to appreciate the cult of Lego now so the big incentive for him to get in a plane to San Diego at some risk to his personal safety was the promise of getting to visit Legoland. I had no idea what to expect and neither did he; at our most specific, I would say we were all imagining a place where there were a lot of Legos to play with.

At the risk of ruining the surprise, Legoland is not like that. It’s like a Lego-themed Disneyland. Admission is heart-stoppingly expensive. There is a weird tie-in with Volvo, raising the question of whether all Scandinavians signed some kind of blood oath of mutual commercial support (but if you’re visiting San Diego and going to Legoland, try to rent a Volvo).

VIP Volvo parking

Although the whole experience primarily made me miss the charms of Fairyland, the most underrated amusement park attraction ever, we had the good fortune of visiting Legoland on what was evidently the least busy day of its entire history, and never waited for even a second in line for a single ride, attraction, or concession, so I have no complaints.

Our kids thought it was awesome, and there is a lot of thought put into what would entertain them.

"Yes, we have no bananas..." (I have no idea why this song, no)

In the water play area, very welcome on a hot day, they can step on dots in the ground to make the fountains go or make music play. The rides are pitch-perfect for a six-year old boy, involving helicopters and boats and trains and fire engines.

However the Volvo sponsorship deal led to some weird moments for us. This was particularly true for the rides that involved driving; kids of various ages can drive little cars around a track, for example, and at the end of the ride they are issued little driver’s licenses.

Legoland driving school

There were, on occasion, opportunities to pedal things, but they were always purely decorative, like on the train in the sky, a surreal experience where a train car with helicopter blades mounted on the tail fin rode on an elevated track through the park, ostensibly moving thanks to the two riders pedaling but in fact powered by an engine. Our kids were both disappointed to discover it was not in fact a train that you pedaled like a bike.

Why include pedals at all if they don't do anything?

Like nearly every amusement park I’ve ever seen, Legoland was surrounded by a sea of parking, and if there’s a way to get there other than by car I can’t figure it out. We were traveling from the city proper by rental car, and expected that we would drive, but it startled me a little. As mentioned our usual amusement park venue is Fairyland, which is so old-school that parking was an obvious afterthought and you can walk there from a nearby BART station (if you are used to city distances, at least; a recent visit from a suburban family member reminded us that there are people who view a half-mile walk with a preschooler and no stroller as something akin to a polar expedition).

Although we had a nice time, I found myself confused by the whole experience (and it was reassuring to read that we are not the only people thinking about this). Have the scales fallen from our eyes? Is it as crazy as it seems to me that we were alone in the carpool lane both there and back yet driving the smallest car on the road? It’s hard not to think of hundreds or thousands of people driving alone in giant trucks as laughable overkill, as if people were walking through the streets with rocket launchers strapped to their back for “personal protection.”

Legoland helicopters can be moved up, down, and around

Is it as bizarre as it seems that the pedals on the Legoland rides were all purely decorative while the controls to operate a small car worked and the ones for a helicopter ride that actually flew it up and down and in circles were functional?  Or am I now a bicycle-crazed crank?

I have a feeling I know the answer to that. At the same time, I don’t feel crazy. That should be worth something. At my old office I somehow got on speed dial at the locked psychiatric ward across the street, and would end up with endless messages on my office voice mail from the King of Hawai’i. He said his name was Raymond, and he would croon nonsense songs into the ether while complaining that I never visited. These calls were the introduction to a wide cast of characters in inpatient lockdown, all of whom seemed harmless enough, although finding a dozen random messages in my voicemail box every morning got to be annoying. Eventually the psych ward staff figured it out and changed the speed dial settings (which I heard happening in the background of the last message). But my point: these people knew that they were off the charts crazy and they didn’t shrink from telling my voicemail about it. When I think about transportation, I don’t think that cars are bad, although I think they’re overused and inappropriate for many conditions (it’s a rare day I don’t ride my bike faster than the cars on the road in San Francisco, and I am slow and frequently carrying an extra person). It doesn’t feel crazy to me to think this, but the reaction I get is often comparable to announcing that I am the King of Hawai’i, and I’ve got a lovely song for you today…

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January 23, 2012 · 10:45 pm

The Co-Rider (aka Bike Tutor) debacle

I have avoided writing about our experience with the Co-Rider for some time, because thinking about it makes me feel nauseated to this day. But it’s probably worth putting down.

Before we realized installing the Co-Rider was a horrible mistake

I knew when I got my bicycle that I wanted to be able to carry both kids. My two children were heavy enough that even the more “conventional” setups for carrying two children on a bike were not really an option. The Bobike Mini/Bobike Maxi combination looked stellar, but at 32 pounds my daughter was only a pound away from the Mini’s weight limit. This was a shame because we trusted the Bobike line at that point. The Yepp Mini seat had the same weight limit. Bike shops we visited that knew anything about child seats liked the Bobike and didn’t object to the Yepp, although the Yepp had been recalled for safety reasons in the past and that tipped the scales toward Bobike.

I wanted a front seat that could hold more weight. There seemed to be only two options. One was the iBert seat, aka The Green Sled, an instantly recognizable bright green plastic seat that held up to 38 pounds. The other was the glowingly reviewed Co-Rider, which claimed to be able to hold a child up to 5 years.

The iBert was cheaper and easily available online, so we asked about it first. We had seen this seat all over the place on Sundays in Golden Gate Park. But we were unable to find a bike shop willing to install it, and none of them would sell it either. The first shop we asked said it was unsafe because it hung from the handlebars and compromised steering, too much of a risk with a child on board, particularly one nearing the top of the acceptable weight range, so they wouldn’t install it for us even if we bought it ourselves. The second shop we asked said it was unsafe because the back of the seat was too low and risked the spine of the child riding it, and they wouldn’t install it even if we bought it ourselves. The third shop said that the mounting bracket was nothing more than a giant steel spike that was a riding death trap, and what’s more the plastic would weaken with anything more than occasional recreational use, risking dropping the kid to the ground, and they wouldn’t install it even if we bought it ourselves. We didn’t get the iBert.

We have since learned that there is at least one well-respected shop in San Francisco that sells the iBert (Roaring Mouse), and ultimately, none of these things would have been as bad as what happened with the Co-Rider. So from my revised perspective we might as well have just taken our chances with the iBert, especially since none of the proposed horror scenarios seems to have actually come to pass. Although in general I think following the advice of informed people is a better idea altogether. More realistically, we should have given up the idea, accepted that we’d missed the window for using a front seat, and looked for a bike for me that could carry two on the back.

Testing the Co-Rider for stability didn't help any: it seemed stable but would collapse less than 15 minutes later

We then moved to the Co-Rider. It looked like what we wanted, and the weight limit was no problem. None of the bike shops we visited had any objection to installing it, probably because none of them had ever heard of it. The setup looked reasonable enough and it attached to the frame, which was apparently desirable. I had to order it myself but Ocean Cyclery was willing to put the Co-Rider on the front of my Breezer and the Bobike Junior on the back. They were confused as to how it could work on a frame without a level top tube, but the Co-Rider website and literature was vehement that the seat could be installed on a step-through frame, and in fact showed one mounted on what looked like an Omafiets, which had the most sloped tube I’ve ever seen on a bicycle.

When I came to pick up my Breezer the Co-Rider was installed on it but the bike shop was, if anything, even more skeptical about the seat. (This is where I should have listened more closely.) They felt it didn’t have any support at the back and that if the screws loosened even slightly, inevitable from the various bumps and impacts that come with regular riding, that the seat would tip. To test it, the shop owner had spent extra time on the installation and taken his six-year-old on an extended test ride to ensure it was stable. He felt it wasn’t going anywhere but was nervous about the design and insisted that I check the stability of the seat every time I put our daughter in it. His concern was prescient.

What the Co-Rider looked like when first installed, correct position

I rode with my daughter in that seat (sometimes with our son in the Bobike Junior in the back) for three weeks, checking the seat for stability every time we rode because I am paranoid like that. On the third weekend, riding in Golden Gate Park after once again checking the seat for stability before departing (no problem), the screws loosened, the seat tipped up 90 degrees, and she tumbled back out of it nearly into the street.

Where the Co-Rider ended up while my daughter was in it and we were crossing six lanes of traffic

The good news is that it was a front seat and I could catch her. The bad news is that we were crossing Masonic at Fell when it happened, and even on a Sunday, this is easily one of the most dangerous intersections in the entire city of San Francisco. Even thinking about this experience months later makes my palms sweat and a headache start.

Because it was my daughter and not my son, she laughed it off like it was an adventure ride I’d created just for her and cheerfully rode in the Bobike Junior the rest of the way home. When I called Ocean Cyclery to tell them how right they were they were mortified that they’d ever installed it.

I was left wondering why I had such a different experience than everyone else who wrote about this seat. When I called the distributor in LA to get a refund (well past the return window, but clearly the seat was defective, and to their credit I did get the full refund) he said that I was the 3rd or 4th person to call with a story of a seat failure like this on a step-through frame. The distributor felt that these people were installing the seat incorrectly but I was pretty sure this was not the case for me, because my seat had been installed by a bike shop with extensive experience. I also thought that given that the problem had been identified by more than a couple of people with the same frame, it was time to investigate the seat design or the fabrication. The distributor said he was sending a request to manufacturer to investigate the problem. But since then there have been no changes in the advertising by the manufacturer, which continues to claim the Co-Rider is appropriate for step-through frames.

In the meantime my feeling is that either I got a seat with defective parts, and I am not the only one, or the seat is fundamentally unsuited to installation anything but a frame with a level top tube. Either option would suggest that the Co-Rider doesn’t belong on anything but a diamond frame, at best. It would be impossible for the seat to tip if installed on a level top tube, because the tube itself would hold up the entire length of the seat. I assume that the people who had good experiences with this seat were riding on diamond frames.

If the Co-Rider hadn’t tipped and nearly sent my daughter head-first and backwards into the street (other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?) I would have other issues, but they are minor. San Francisco is windy and my daughter didn’t like to ride very fast on this seat, because of the wind chill (both the Bobike and Yepp seats come with optional windscreens). The footrests look impressive but don’t have straps to hold her feet in, so she liked to kick sideways, which at times made the bike wobble. The seat is heavy and rattles when a child isn’t riding in it, and the welds are sloppy. Heavy is understandable given that it’s supposed to hold an older child; the sloppy welds and rattles (and my terrible experience) made me suspect that the seat is poorly made.

I liked riding with my daughter in a front seat, because it was easy to have a conversation and felt intimate. Putting the kid on the front also makes the ride a lot smoother; crossing Muni tracks with a child in a front seat makes the bumps forgettable, and there was never any risk of popping a wheelie on the uphills. I would  have loved to have her there longer and if I were riding a diamond-frame bike, without any need for a rear child seat, we would probably have enjoyed using this seat for a couple of years to come. Admittedly we would have ridden at a very slow pace. After having the seat literally collapse underneath my daughter, however, I can’t imagine ever using it again.

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January 16, 2012 · 1:21 pm

Cruisers at Pacific Beach

Our first night in San Diego we headed out for Mexican food, or at least a quesadilla, the only food our son will consistently eat. In kindergarten he composed a brief poem to the quesadilla, his favorite food, poorly spelled but nonetheless hauntingly evocative.

A wall with far less than half of the bike basket selection

By complete happenstance, while walking there we stumbled into Bicycle Discovery, the beachiest bike shop in my personal experience, if not the world. What I noticed first, from outside, was the entire wall of bicycle baskets, the most extensive I’ve ever seen either in-person or online, and although we were all hungry I insisted we check it out.

Once inside no one was disappointed.

I'm sure that these in no way encourage drinking and riding

Matt had to forcibly rip himself away from the handlebar baskets carved from coconut shells to look like the drinks you get at tiki bars. Both kids were fascinated by the chopper beach cruisers with handlebars taller than they were and four inch wide tires.

This bicycle appears to be on loan from an alternate universe where cyclists are cool

One of these was a tandem! We bought our daughter’s dinosaur horn online but at this place we could have chosen from hundreds of models. The kids rode balance bikes and tricycles in the store and investigated all the various baskets and panniers; luckily for us the staff was not just patient but indulgent. Our daughter was traumatized that she was not yet big enough to ride the bike covered with pink skulls.

In keeping with the San Diego spirit this store was as big as a warehouse would be in San Francisco.

No single photograph could do this store justice

I would guess that 90% of the bicycles on the floor were single-speed beach cruisers and most of them came in colors I’ve previously only seen on giant lollipops. San Diego proper is as flat as a griddle. While we were there the store was mobbed by a contingent of Danes (which we identified because they were speaking Danish). The Danes are coming to SoCal for bicycles now? Has it really come to this?

We came back our second day to visit the beach and the kids did not need convincing to try out new rental bikes.

How can there be multiple models of unicycles?

The store must do a land office family rental business, because they had multiple bikes set up with both child seats and trailer-bikes, and had them unlocked and ready to roll before our kids had made it out of the bathroom. I ended up with our daughter on a cruiser with a Co-Pilot Limo seat on the rack. Matt and our son ended up on a different cruiser attached to an Adams Trail-a-Bike.

After complimenting our son extensively on his Bikefish t-shirt (“Bikes eating a car: RIGHT ON!”), they sent us off to ride along the beach.

Figuring out the trailer bike

As one of them took our picture for the family, Matt commented drily, “Oh yes. Because no one would ever believe we rented bicycles if there weren’t photographic evidence.” Okay, maybe our biking habits are now more than two standard deviations from normal. I never imagined we could get to this point in less than a year.

I have never seen as many forms of mobility as we saw on the beach of San Diego. Dog pulling two skateboarders, trail-a-bikes, elliptical bike, kid bike pulling skateboard, rollerblader with a stroller, segways, and those are just the ones I remember. A bike with a child seat like mine was no novelty by comparison, even with my daughter yelling, “Ta ta ta TAAAA!!!” in the back as we rode (useful, given that we had no bell on that bike and the beach walk was crowded).

It was interesting to try riding such different bikes than we normally ride. Cruisers are about as simple as a bike can get, and they had big fat seats that were obviously designed for a cushy ride. Both of us found them uncomfortable.

Co-Pilot Limo test ride

I asked our daughter what she thought of the Co-Pilot and she said she liked the Bobike Maxi better. I was actually surprised because I thought that Co-Pilot had a nice arm rest; she is too young to elaborate her reasoning. Our son enjoyed the chance to pedal on the trailer-bike, but he found it unstable. He now wants to try a real tandem, which he believes would be less floppy, and I suspect he is right. Matt is used to the MinUte and disliked both the length and the wobbliness of the trailer-bike, although he liked getting some help with pedaling.

Along Pacific Beach with cruiser and trailer-bike

We both got off the rental bikes thankful we’d chosen to buy bikes better suited to us. But we learned a lot; we were correct in guessing that a trailer-bike wasn’t right for us, and we now know that our son would be eager to ride a tandem.

It was a great way to spend an afternoon and we couldn’t be happier that we rented those bikes, unlike the surrey. The beach was packed with people enjoying the day. Sun, sand, waves, and mid-70s temps in the middle of January: it is no accident that we spent most of our time outside during our stay. Curse you, Southern California, and your seductive wiles.

Further test riding was required in-store

We wouldn’t have seen half of it walking or any of it driving, and six months ago we would never have considered renting bicycles on vacation with our kids. If someone had suggested it we would have dismissed the idea outright, expecting there was nothing available for them to ride. Now I feel as though family biking is something that was always there,  waiting to be stumbled upon. We feel lucky now just to have been at the right place at the right time.

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January 16, 2012 · 8:25 am

4 wheels bad, 2 wheels good

Looks ridiculous, rides like a Flintstone car

The resolute flatness of San Diego gave us a lot of hope about a promise we’d made to the kids the second that they saw the website of the hotel where we stayed, which prominently featured its bike and surrey rentals. They have been crazy to rent surreys ever since they first saw one in Golden Gate Park, and we’ve never done it because we always ride there on our own bikes, and the weirdness inherent in biking somewhere to rent a surrey made my head spin. But we agreed that we would rent a surrey on vacation and we did.

Having now rented a surrey I can say that it is an unbelievable behemoth of a bicycle-like machine. I seriously reconsidered my burgeoning interest in a longtail or a tandem during our hour-long ride, in fact during the first five minutes of our hour-long ride. I don’t know whether the surreys we rented were junkers that had been permanently disabled by exposure to sea air, maybe so. Matt, who has a physics background and a strong theoretical understanding of such things (although, as mentioned, nil in the way of practical application of same), felt that running two sets of pedals in parallel with a second set of gears and an axle implied all the weight of carrying four people with only half the mechanical efficiency. Then he groaned with the effort of turning the wheel to get us around a 15 degree corner. We had to stand on the pedals to get over a speed bump and brake when faced with the downhill on the opposite side. I have been told that I have a habit of hyberbole but in this case I am completely serious.

Building sandcastles, no tools required

The kids enjoyed the ride for a while but quickly grew bored and asked to go play on the beach. Exhausted with effort of pedaling them there at a rate slightly slower than walking, we agreed.

I’m glad we rented a surrey because it was important to our kids and they enjoyed it, laughing through much of the ride and appreciating a promise kept. And we never had to worry about cars, for the brief period of time when we were on the road. Most of the risk of bicycling seems to center on not being noticed, and no one fails to notice a surrey, certainly not a bright red surrey wallowing along like a beached walrus.

Zero-risk camera-shot on the surrey

Our greatest risk was drivers losing control of their cars as they burst out laughing; we also managed to completely stop a few boats worth of competitive rowers on the bay, who stared at us slack-jawed and pointed. I have grown used to comparable things riding with our daughter on board at home, particularly when I do things like wrap her in a Mylar blanket, and I like to imagine that it keeps us safer.

However none of us wants to rent a surrey again and Matt and I are thankful for that. It was entertaining enough as a lark but it does make me thankful that we appear to have chosen well enough for our first bicycles that we are always pleased to get on and ride somewhere, to the point that our ambition at times exceeds our abilities. We have heard from people that have bicycles less well-suited to them that they are far less interested in riding than we are; it is not fun for them. We could have chosen the surreys of bicycles and I imagine that my brother-in-law’s vehement advice to us to purchase new bicycles well above the price point that novices appreciate as reasonable, as well as his insistence that we avoid even setting foot in certain bike shops, reflected his knowledge that it is easy to misstep and choose poorly when you are as ignorant as we are.

The rental agent's bicycle was more ironic, but also more practical

Having asked around among the many people I know who never ride bicycles and in some cases never have ridden one, my assessment of the price point that novices view as reasonable for a starter bike is: $100. I had no perspective on this question one way or the other before I started riding, but having gone down this road I can now say that the price point that would get a novice on a bike that is actually fun to ride as a commuter would be something between $500-$1000, at least in San Francisco (possibly cheaper somewhere flatter, but more expensive if the goal is to haul multiple children or serious cargo), including lights, fenders and a rear rack. That was an easy number for us to accept because we were comparing the cost of bicycles against the cost of a hypothetical second car. For people who are less certain about whether they will ride at all, I would imagine that’s a harder figure to swallow.

I think that the knee-jerk reaction that a price above $100 is unreasonable (which is usually where the conversation goes after I ask for a “reasonable” price) is worth reconsidering. Certainly reconsidering is a better reaction than sprinting off to Walmart, which will cheerfully sell people something like the surrey of bicycles near that price point, to the purchaser’s eventual despair. I can’t think of a single person who would expect that a mattress purchased for $20 would offer a peaceful night’s sleep unless they were extraordinarily lucky. And a bicycle is more complicated than a mattress.

Obviously used bicycles are cheaper but the (startlingly common) assumption that a total novice without daily access to a knowledgeable source could find a good used bike (or assemble one from parts!) is simply not reasonable. Craigslist lays many traps for the unwary, and I have heard now from more than one of my graduate students who tried to follow casual advice to “find a good frame and have a bike shop turn it into the perfect ride for half the price of new” that the best description of that advice would be “recipe for disaster.” Even my brother-in-law, who is a former bicycle mechanic, sent my sister out to buy a Jamis when she wanted a bike. It is true that a Jamis will not turn heads, but it was an excellent value and she enjoys riding it. And she and I are both somewhat contrarian so we appreciate the charms of being underrated.

Can I get off now?

Now that we have found bicycle shops we trust and have some experience and knowledge we could probably do well on the used bicycle market. But we have bicycles now. Even so I can easily imagine how much more poorly our search could have gone without the occasional push in the right direction from my brother-in-law. Knowing him as I do, I realize now that I owe him a box of cheap wine and another of expensive Japanese chocolates.

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January 14, 2012 · 9:46 am

The Christmas bike: Jamis Laser 20”

Our son liked his old balance bike so much that he was reluctant to share it with his sister, even as he outgrew it and she grew into it. Until recently we had not considered getting him another bike, as larger-sized bicycles came with pedals, which he had never really shown much interest in using. His initial attraction to renting a kid’s bike in Copenhagen was immediately overtaken by the fun of riding on the back of our bikes. We assumed that he’d come around to riding his own bike eventually, but estimated that that interest would build over the course of a year or two. That didn’t concern us much given that both logistically and traffic-wise it’s unrealistic for him to ride on his own to school and back. We were surprised but pleased when after a few months of riding with us he said he wanted a “big kid” bike with pedals.

We didn’t take our son’s interest in a new bike very seriously at first, but as time passed, he became increasingly insistent that a bike was what he wanted for Christmas. I’m not sure where he learned that a bicycle was a traditional Christmas gift, but fair enough, it was. When we mentioned at one point that there is a bicycle summer camp in San Francisco, where kids can both learn to ride and take day trips across the Golden Gate Bridge, to cooking classes at the Ferry Building, through city parks, and to the zoo, his desire for a bike reached a fever pitch: he wanted a bike, and he wanted to learn to ride it in time for Wheel Kids summer camp.

Although buying so many bikes in a few months was starting to feel ridiculous, we also felt like it would be crazy to miss the opportunity to get our son riding when he was so motivated. And he correctly pointed out that he was now the only person in the family without his own bicycle. So onward: another bicycle. The selection of children’s bicycles is almost as confusing as the selection of adult bicycles, but mercifully, there are many fewer models available and they are cheaper. Our son, a very tall six-year-old, seemed the right size for a bike with 20” wheels, which would probably last him until middle school.  We hardly needed the advice to avoid big-box store kids’ bikes, as there are no such stores in San Francisco. Once again my brother-in-law offered advice that could get us to a decent ride. He recommended Wheels of Justice Cyclery, a Bay Area shop specializing in children’s bikes that not only had the coolest name ever but offered a buyback program, where any bicycle purchased from them could be returned anytime and 50% of the price would be taken off the next bicycle. The idea behind it was to help parents resist the temptation to save money by buying a bike that was too big and that scared kids off of riding for good.

The downside of Wheels of Justice is that they are located in Oakland. Getting there involves a brutal drive that promised to send our kids, no fans of driving anyway, into complete meltdowns. We weren’t absolutely sure about the appropriate size of bicycle and knew we wanted to bring our son for a fitting. So despite our fears, we packed both kids into the car one evening a couple of weeks before Christmas for a trip to what we said was a surprise destination. Our daughter screamed bloody murder for the entire half hour it took us to get off the Bay Bridge and into Montclair. By the time we parked the car, I wanted to kill my brother-in-law for sending us across the Bay. Mercifully, our son passed out cold about five minutes into our daughter’s screaming fit. Less mercifully, we had to wake him up on arrival, at which point we had two howling kids to wrangle. Fortunately Montclair has a frozen yogurt shop, which we carried them into, ordering each an extra large cup. By the time they’d finished eating, they had mellowed to the point that they were only in very bad moods. Onward to Wheels of Justice!

To my surprise, our son had not made the connection between his desire for a bicycle and this trip, and was completely gobsmacked when we arrived at a bicycle shop. His mood immediately ratcheted up to delighted. Our daughter spotted some bikes with streamers and perked up as well. Living up to their promise, Wheels of Justice primarily stocked kids’ bikes, and given that it was the Christmas season, there were a lot of them on the floor. There were also a lot of people buying kids’ bikes; unlike our other bicycles, this was clearly not going to be a purchase heavily discounted from list price. The selection of bikes ranged pretty widely, from simple single-speeds to geared mountain bikes with suspension forks (which I still think of as the thingy that holds the front wheel on the bike that looks like it has springs inside). Thanks to the Wheel Kids site (and once again vetted by my brother-in-law, who has in a few total hours over the last five years spared us many bad decisions) we knew what we wanted as a first bike: a single-speed bike with coaster brakes and a hand brake for the rear wheel (not the front wheel because gripping a front wheel brake too hard could send a kid over the handlebars). Happily, this is also the cheapest kind of decent kids’ bike.

Classic Christmas morning photo

It took a while to find someone to help us as the shop was slammed, but Matt was happy to cruise the selection of commuter gloves while the kids climbed on and off various bikes. When someone in the shop was finally free he confirmed that we wanted a 20” bike after popping our son on and off a couple of bikes, and told us that given what we wanted there were two options: a Jamis Laser or a COBO. They could build us a COBO in the next week that we could reserve and drive back to pick up, or sell us a Laser that night. The guy at the shop didn’t see much difference between the bikes except that they thought the Laser had a nicer paint job. Remembering the drive we’d had already, we bought the Laser.

Our son, who is a model of patience and discretion among six-year-olds, accepted that this was the last he would see of his bike until Christmas, and even pretended on occasion over the next two weeks that he didn’t know he’d be getting one. His first ride was on Christmas Day, and he needed one of us to hold the back of his jacket the whole time. His second ride was a couple of days later, and by the end of that ride, he was riding on his own. Admittedly his strategy for finishing a ride still involves riding headlong directly at one of us and yelling, “Grab my bike! I need to stop now!”

The Jamis Laser has some weaknesses, but I’m not sure that there is much we could buy that is better. Our son is familiar with our bikes, and immediately noticed the lack of fenders, lights, and a bell. He has argued that these are gaps that compromise safety and function and would like these accessories added to his bike as soon as possible. (Of course, he is six years old, and thus I suspect that he would cheerfully accessorize with anything and everything up to and including streamers on the handlebars.) I’m not sure that we can add fenders to the bike (we asked, and the verdict was that it is unlikely), but the rest is easy enough; however I feel like the bell at least should come standard. Our son also wondered why his bike didn’t come with a U-lock, as it has not escaped him that we lock up our own bikes even within the already double-locked building garage (I myself have often wondered the same thing about my own bike). Finally, we all find this bike to be pretty heavy for a child. Our son is strong for his age but lifting the bike is real work for him; this was a big disappointment after the ultralight balance bike.

We were surprised and delighted to see one of his 1st grade classmates, a friend since the first day of kindergarten, riding the exact same bicycle, right down to the color, on New Year’s Day. His parents don’t bike commute to school, so we didn’t realize they even had bikes, but like us, they were out for a family ride on Sunday in Golden Gate Park: one parent had a child seat for their daughter, the other carried her balance bike, and their son rode alongside on his Laser. Seeing our friends out like us on bikes, and our kids’ matching bicycles, pretty much made our day. What can I say? We’re cheap dates.

Girl on Schwinn

In defense of the Laser, there is a lot of crap out there people expect kids to ride. Other than an amazing old Schwinn one girl was riding, our son’s bike was the most functional bicycle we saw in the parade of new Christmas bikes in Golden Gate Park over the last week of the year. The awesome Schwinn was, according to the rider’s grandmother, 35 years old and her mother’s bike before her, stored  in the garage (under a bag of lawn fertilizer…) awaiting a new generation all those decades. That bike did have fenders, as well as huge sweeping handlebars and a kickstand and a full chainguard. The Laser, to its credit, also has a kickstand and a chainguard. The Schwinn did not have a hand brake, and that is a strong point in the Laser’s favor, because the only way that poor girl could stop the bike quickly was to reverse the pedals, at which point she would fall right off the bike. (I suspect it would be easy to add a hand brake.) Both bikes weigh a ton considering that they are meant for children. The absence of hand brakes was epidemic among other kids’ bikes we saw, many of which seemed to rattle aggressively even after they stopped moving. Based on their lack of major brand labels I assume that these bikes were purchased at Target or Walmart. Although I understand the temptation, because those bikes are cheap and because employees at Target/Walmart typically don’t treat kids like they are radioactive, I’m glad we went to a real bike shop (and I’m particularly glad it was kid-friendly). Despite my annoyance about what’s missing from the Laser, it is clear that we could have done much worse.

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January 11, 2012 · 8:50 am

Patient Zero: The Specialized Hotwalk balance bike (with pirates)

What's missing from this bike?

Technically speaking, I now realize, the first bicycle to enter our household was not the Kona. It was a balance bike that was the index case in this newfound obsession. Way back in 2007, when our son was turning two, my sister and brother-in-law brought over what I now realize was a very generous birthday gift, a balance bike. We assumed, may we one day be forgiven, that this was one of those gifts that reflects the taste of the giver, a bicycle gift from a lifetime bicycle obsessive, comparable to the decorative crystal candy dishes given as wedding gifts by our great-aunts that reflected their ambition for us to lead a far less itinerant lifestyle. At the time, balance bikes were not the hot-ticket holiday must-haves that they are today, and our primary reaction was confusion.  Our son was too young for a bicycle, and this one seemed to be lacking some critical parts.

The model that my brother-in-law chose was actually an informed consumer purchase. The tires, unlike those of many balance bicycles, were filled with air rather than being solid rubber. The bicycle was light enough to be picked up easily by a toddler. And although our son was at the time too young to appreciate it, the bicycle was also covered with pictures of pirates. You can’t buy that kind of quality décor in these modern-day balance bikes.

Arrrr...

This bicycle was valued enough to survive the most recent move from our old apartment, and after five moves in as many years we had become ruthless about what we were willing to pack. I had never paid the slightest attention to this bike beyond the practical considerations of finding a place to put it and helping our son ride it. This bicycle is the only reason we owned a pump. I had to look up the brand’s history by year to realize it was the Specialized Hotwalk. Is it a real bike if it doesn’t have a serial number?

Despite our reservations at the time we got it, our son was committed to learning to ride the Hotwalk. At two he was too short to ride even with the seat lowered as far as it would go, but he found it fascinating, and thanks to a growth spurt that continues to this day, which has led pediatricians to predict his adult height at somewhere around six and a half feet, he picked it up quickly enough. He grew bored quickly with his initial efforts to crab-walk it along and started pushing off hard enough that he cruised down entire city blocks without stopping. Other parents watched with amazement as he literally rode circles around their older kids on bikes with training wheels. To this day, although he has long since outgrown it, he still feels most comfortable on this bike, and will at times rip it from his sister’s hands in an effort to ride it. He jumped directly from this bike to a pedal bike. He makes no secret of his disdain for training wheels, which he has never used. This can be embarrassing when we meet other families at the park.

With the benefit of hindsight, I realize that this bike is the reason that our determinedly cautious son, who to our joy has never needed to be rushed to the emergency room after causing himself a debilitating injury, was even willing to consider climbing aboard a rental bike during our stay in Copenhagen. Riding in a child seat and as a stoker places some basic balancing demands on kids, and although wild kicks and swings are pretty trivial for an adult rider to correct when kids are small, they get more challenging as the kids grow heavier and longer-limbed. Our son’s comfort with the balance bike translated easily to comfort climbing on and off the back of an adult bike, and has made it much easier to haul a 45 pound passenger on our commutes.

"Klaxon Velo Dinosaure" according to the package label

As our daughter grew bigger, she wanted to follow his lead, and in the last few months, has begun to move beyond walking the bike to coasting. We added a dinosaur horn to the bike to make it hers, and she has learned to honk it wildly when other bikes are approaching, or might be approaching, or are visible in the distance, or when she needs to indicate that she has a horn. When we took the kids to Golden Gate Park after Christmas, we found a dozen kids her age with balance bikes in a rainbow of colors delivered by Santa.

"We go fast!"

Unlike them, she had a few months of riding under her belt, and thus led their spontaneous little balance bike gang around the Music Concourse. Honk, honk!

Our move to bicycle commuting was driven by our kids’ delight in riding. I realize now that although their eagerness to ride was triggered by renting bikes in Copenhagen, it really grew from the years our son spent on the balance bike, learning the freedom of powering himself through the world much faster than he could walk or run.

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January 5, 2012 · 5:20 pm

The Breezer Uptown 8 (step-through)

Nice bikes… too nice

I knew what I wanted: a bicycle with all of the bells and whistles that commuters typically have to add to bicycles, unless they buy heavy, expensive Dutch bicycles: lights that didn’t need to be charged, gears that couldn’t drop off the chain, ability to hold tons of weight. Basically a dorkcycle.

It was easier to find the child seats I wanted, thanks to our European experience. And in retrospect there is good advice out there suggesting that you pick the child seat before the bike anyway. We’d become familiar with the Bobike Maxi, but our son, nearing six, had aged out of that seat. At that point most people stuck the kid on a trailer bike or their own bike, but we had length and school drop off and pick up problems that made that idea a non-starter. The other option to haul older kids was a longtail bike (and this idea still has some appeal) but my husband was riding a sorta-kinda cargo bike that seemed to be meeting that need.

Bobike has a seat that doesn’t get much attention in the US, the Bobike Junior. It holds a kid aged 6-10 weighing up to 75 pounds. It looked like what I wanted, assuming that I could find a bike that would take the weight. This is not a cheap child seat, but we were looking at using it for not one but two kids over the next decade, and what’s more we’d bought car seats around the same price point that didn’t get as much use. (And of course, if we’d bought a second car, we probably would have had to double our car seat collection too.) It seemed insanely difficult to find reviews of this seat in English, but eventually I found someone who’d not just noticed it and thought it looked interesting and then balked at the price, but actually hauled a kid on it for years. That was the indefatigable Adrienne of Change Your Life, Ride A Bike, who not only sang the praises of the Junior, but lived in San Francisco and recommended a local bike shop that stocked it. I had previously assumed that the seat was only available in the US from the family biking Promised Land of Clever Cycles in Portland, Oregon.

Both of these were helpful recommendations. The Bobike Junior is an outstanding seat, and the only way that I could imagine hauling an older child on a normal bike. And Ocean Cyclery has been great to us, as one of the few San Francisco shops we’ve visited that has extensive familiarity with child seats (owned by an American/Dutch couple with kids of their own), welcomes kids who show up in the shop and start tearing around, and stocks an extensive selection of bikes set up for both commuters and kids themselves. The last time we visited, the bike in the front window was a commuter step through with a Bobike Mini on the front and a Bobike Maxi on the back. Other than shops with “Dutch” somewhere in the name, I’ve never seen anything similar elsewhere. And although I try to harp on price too much, reminding myself that we could buy a dozen bicycles without hitting the price point or storage problems we’d face acquiring a second car, Dutch bicycles sell at prices that made me concerned making a bad decision, especially given their weight. Maybe they’re a good value on a per pound basis. Whereas Ocean primarily carried bicycles with price tags way under $1,000.

Moreover, Ocean carried a line of commuter bicycles that I’d never seen in person, but was reading crazy-good reviews about from all over the place: Breezer. I do research for a living, and at this point have descended to the kind of intellectual tail-eating where I conduct systematic reviews and read articles about how to process too much information. As a result I no longer trust my own individual judgment much because research tells me it’s much less reliable than the experiences of lots of other people. And lots and lots of other people liked the Breezer Uptown. Big, heavy men liked it and said it hauled 300 pounds without a shudder. Almost everyone said that riding an Uptown was like riding a couch, in terms of nonexistent saddle soreness or lower back pain. It had a mountain bike pedigree and was, as a result, geared for hills. It came with every commuting accessory: fenders, dynamo lights, internal gears, a chain guard, even a rear wheel lock. And even loaded up with all of those extras, the bike weighed only 35 pounds; light enough that even after adding two child seats, I’d still only have achieved the weight of the single-speed Dutch bikes we’d rented in Europe when they were carrying nothing at all. I could imagine lifting this bike (and I do in fact lift it every time I park it at work).

There were, admittedly, comments that the Breezer Uptown was unlovely, with all the practicality and style of a vacuum cleaner. And it was not a bicycle that was setting any land speed records. These concerns struck me as aesthetic and irrelevant. I was looking for a dorkcycle, and anyone riding a bicycle in the United States is already hopelessly unfashionable anyway. I wanted to haul 75 pounds of children plus our gear up the non-trivial hill we lived on every day. I didn’t care if the bicycle looked like a cinder block if it was comfortable to ride and could climb. If anything, having a bicycle that didn’t turn heads might reduce the odds of it being stolen. Bicycle thefts in our neighborhood have progressed to the point where prevention means U-locking your bike inside a safety coffin in your bedroom.

Ocean Cyclery had a Breezer on the floor that I could try, although they warned me I was too tall for the medium frames they had in stock and it wasn’t really ready to ride. The shop is located near a weird but friendly test ride: a street converted from an old horse-racing track in the middle of the city that made a perfect 1-mile loop, with a couple of hills heading on and off. They were right that the frame was too small for me, and the front fender was loose and rattled the entire time, but even so the bike was more comfortable than anything else I’d been on in my visits to seven other bike shops in San Francisco. The owner thought my desire to put two child seats on the front and back was a nifty idea; it was something he’d wanted to do with his own kids before realizing they were too far apart in age. And unlike every other bike shop where I’d proposed this idea, he immediately understood why this meant I’d need a step-through frame. After hearing where we lived, he thought (and my brother-in-law confirmed) that the 8-speed was the best bet to get me home every evening.

I made a deposit on a Breezer Uptown 8 that afternoon. Buying a new bike in the late fall meant that the price was way below list; in the same range as the (estimated, wildly varying) price of buying a used bike of dubious provenance and trying to upgrade it to something like what I wanted, and astonishingly, cheaper than buying it online and having to assemble it myself (which I couldn’t do anyway). Bonus! The owner was sure it would arrive and be ready before my husband’s next trip to China, making it possible for me to ride my son to school while Matt was away. Of course it was late. We drove to school that entire week.

As always, my bike needs more stuff hanging off it

When the bike arrived, my daughter was ecstatic. On my first ride she insisted on climbing aboard and shrieking, “I’m riding it! I’m riding it!” until my significantly more cautious son couldn’t take the humiliation any longer and jumped aboard despite the absence of the stoker bars he’d grown accustomed to. He likes riding the Bobike Junior on my bike. I like this bike too.

I did not dip my toe slowly into bicycle commuting. My first few rides were with both kids on board up hills with double-digit grades. Because I was totally ignorant I did that with the hub dynamo lights on, which meant even more drag. Even so, I did not have to walk. For the first month I never took off either child seat, even when the kids weren’t riding along, because I didn’t know how, meaning that I was regularly hauling an extra 20 pounds no matter what. I take my son to school on this bike once a week, haul my daughter around all weekend long, and on days that they’re not on board, load up two panniers and a front basket with most of our weekly groceries. I ride this bike pretty much everywhere but the Tenderloin (where it would be covered with piss and/or vomit if I were lucky enough not to have it stolen) and the Mission (where it would simply be stolen). I have never been saddle-sore, and only rarely, after a long ride with kids and gear, have I felt any pain at all after riding. Braking on the downhills with a kid on the back can be unnerving—it takes quite a bit more preparation than it does when riding alone—and I’ve nearly popped a wheelie going up some steeper hills in the city with one of them on the back, but more informed people tell me that these things would happen on any bicycle.

Off road, on road

The Breezer, as I’d hoped when I bought a bike tricked out with every commuting accessory known to nerds, makes it easier to ride my bike most of the time than to drive our car. Thanks to the Bobike oeuvre, that’s true even when I’m going somewhere with one kid in tow. When I step onto this bike I feel like I’m ten feet tall. The lights come on with the flick of a switch. The lock is always on board, although given where we live I think that all bikes should come with a U-lock holder in lieu of the largely-decorative rear wheel lock. Even with kids on board, it glides up the endless San Francisco hills, and I can even afford to keep the lights on. I’ve only had to walk it once, when I lost momentum because Matt was weaving in front of me (and he had reason). As I’ve gotten stronger I’ve been able to reserve the first gear more and more for heavy loads. I wouldn’t call this a fast bike, but I’m just trying to get to work with my teaching clothes looking decent, and anyway I ride through Golden Gate Park most days and it’s gorgeous there, so I’m in no special hurry. And once I started taking the child seats off when the kids weren’t on board, my commute got noticeably faster. On days when I’m whizzing down the hill out of the park past a row of stopped cars, our household’s Pixar obsession has led me to yell, “Ride like the wind, Bullseye!”

I can imagine that someday when the kids are older and riding on their own I may want a prettier, faster bike. For the foreseeable future I feel like I’ve made the right decision, even though this bike, like Matt’s Kona, isn’t always everything I want it to be. I would be happier if the bike could still carry both kids at once, and if the rear rack were longer so it fit panniers when the Bobike Maxi is attached (panniers do at least fit under the Junior) or if came with a front rack. The front light could be brighter. I would happily swap the top two gears for an even lower first gear. These are not big complaints.

When I am riding around the city, my Danish helmet and our child seats draw lots of attention and compliments. No one has ever complimented me on my Breezer. I cannot bring myself to care.

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December 9, 2011 · 12:54 pm

Our first bike: The Kona MinUte

[February 2012: I have updated our experience with the MinUte here. And also here.]

So, a longtail: even though Matt wasn’t thrilled about the downsides he didn’t have any better ideas. We were getting him the first bike because I had the university shuttle taking me almost door to door, but most longtails seemed to be adjustable enough for two riders if it came to that, and all of them could carry two kids. At that point the only experience we had with longtails was some fellow school parents who liked their Ute. My brother-in-law, a former bike mechanic and bike messenger and our go-to person for all things bike-related, said that he liked Konas and was in fact, commuting on one. He didn’t like the Radish for reasons that I still don’t know enough about bikes to understand or even repeat, and didn’t like the Xtracycle because of what is apparently referred to as “flex” which is a concept I don’t really understand either. Plus he knew that we didn’t have any kind of handiness around bikes or a donor bike, which are apparently good things to have if you want to set up an Xtracycle. Nobody I asked knew anything about the Mundo or Big Dummy (I have since met someone who does know something about the Big Dummy and apparently that bike is awesome, with a price to match).  So I went online to look up Kona dealers and the closest one was the local bike shop that my brother-in-law had been raving about and urging us to visit since we got back from Europe. Okey dokey then, we’d check out the Kona Ute. While I was on the Kona site I figured I’d look up the price of the Ute (although I already knew it was definitely going to be cheaper than the second car we’d grudgingly been saving up for). Under the list of commuter bikes was something I’d never seen before, new for 2012: the MinUte.

Looking at the MinUte online, it was like someone had designed a bike just for us—a longtail with a normal bike’s footprint. Despite that the back deck was only 4” shorter than the Xtracycle deck, which meant plenty of room for the kids. It came stock with two giant bags, and they sat back behind where our son would sit. It had fenders to keep off road crap and mountain bike gears to grind up hills. The limited complaints about its big brother, the Ute, in reviews centered on the aluminum frame and limited cargo capacity (plus some complaints that it wasn’t Xtracycle-like enough that I assume make sense to people who know something about such things). But with our hill problem the lighter weight of an aluminum bike was appealing. Given that we had no desire to haul much more than a kid or two and some groceries, being unable to haul a surfboard, lumber, or 900 bananas wasn’t a big issue for us. Sure, it would be great if the bike came tricked out for commuting with wired lights, a chain guard, and internal gears, but Matt felt that the price, pretty competitive for a cargo bike, more than made up for wrapping up his pants leg on the way to work, and he was thrilled that he wouldn’t have to park it on the street. We are anything but adventurous as a rule but this brand-new bike (a medium tail?) seemed like the bike for us.

We went to Everybody Bikes (a fantastic shop for know-nothings like us despite its high hipster quotient) to check out the bike only to discover that it wasn’t available yet. But the shop did have a Kona Ute and some other bikes to try for size, and Matt liked them. They would be happy to stick on stoker bars and foot pegs for our son when the bike arrived, and our son, for his part, couldn’t wait to try it. Now all that we had to do was wait, and pray that it came in time to solve our soccer pickup problem.

I have since learned that nothing that involves getting a bike ever happens on time (unless you buy something in stock right there off the floor). I still resent this, but I have learned to accept it. If like me, you are new to the world of biking, you might as well know in advance. Your bike will arrive late, and some non-critical parts will probably arrive even later.

Luckily for us, although All Bike Orders Are Late, we only had to do one soccer pickup before it arrived, which we managed with car share. That sucked. But the MinUte arrived. It was missing some non-critical parts. The cargo bags were apparently stuck on a slow boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The (aftermarket) foot pegs were no longer in production. But the bike was there and it looked good, and the stoker bars swooped up at the perfect spot for a six-year-old. Matt was ready to take it for a spin: he pronounced it awesome.

Her punches are surprisingly ferocious

Our son was jumping up and down to get on and ride once Matt felt comfortable on the bike. Of course we had to pry our two-year-old daughter off the back deck, where she was already attempting to jump up and down while insisting that she be allowed to ride, because we should have just named her “Danger” and spared everyone the bother of having to figure it out. Our son climbed on board and decided it wasn’t so great after all: the bike was wobbly, it was scary. We bucked him up with memories of biking in Copenhagen, even though he wailed that he wanted to ride on the Bobike Maxi again (a seat he had since outgrown). Matt said he’d ride slowly. They took off and DISASTER. Without footpegs or panniers to block the spokes, our son’s foot, clinging to the bike as tightly as possible in fear, went directly into the spokes, cutting and bruising his ankle. Maybe those missing parts weren’t so non-critical after all. We felt like idiots.

So the first attempt to ride the MinUte ended with our son weeping in pain and fear and howling that he never wanted to go near a bike again. Matt rode home to get the minivan and we went home that way, feeling completely defeated.

We had about three days before the next soccer pickup to convince our son to try the bike again. The bike shop’s mortified owners called to say that they’d found the discontinued foot-pegs on Ebay for us, but it would be a couple of weeks before they arrived. No one had a clue when the bags would arrive. In the meantime we needed some motivation and we needed something to keep his feet out of the spokes.

Motivation came from massive amounts of screen time. We set up a slide show on Matt’s computer made up of shots of them riding in Copenhagen, which helped, but what helped even more was a movie from Car Free Days, showing their son jumping on and off the back deck of an Xtracycle. I could not be more grateful that they posted that movie; we must have watched it 100 times that afternoon. Our son thought it was the coolest thing ever. Something to keep his feet out of the pegs came after he went to bed. I kludged together the world’s most ghetto panniers; a piece of kraft paper folded to make two pockets, held together with duct tape (as noted: not handy).  He could put his feet in the pockets to prevent them going into the spokes until the real footpegs and bags arrived.

The MinUte kludged out with our ghetto duct tape panniers

The next morning we walked the bike down to Golden Gate Park—flat! no cars!—to try riding again. After a day of unrelenting motivational efforts our son was not totally repelled by the idea. We spent the walk talking up the safety features of the duct tape panniers.  (Because he is six this did not meet with the ridicule it deserved.) At the park, faced with the prospect of actually getting on the bike, he decided it wasn’t such a good idea after all. With much prompting, he finally tried it, feet firmly planted in the new duct tape pannier pockets, but immediately wailed that he wanted to get off. Matt lost patience and rode off anyway, leaving us with a dopplered, “NOOO!!!!!!!!” A few hundred feet later, our son was cheering and shouting that he loved riding the new bike. Success! Since then he’s been impossible to extricate from that bike. He is as proud as royalty riding it into school and wrote up his story of learning to ride it for a school project. His teacher assumed that it was fictional, given that everyone else in the class wrote about their superpowers (e.g. flying, invisibility). He now wants his own bike, which we’d previously assumed was months if not years away.

So is the MinUte everything we’d hoped for? Yes and no.

NO: Matt got the larger frame size (20”), and it turns out that it is too large for me to ride. My brother-in-law says that this is a design decision and the frame could easily be modified by Kona to be more adjustable for people of varying heights; whatever the reason, this is a one-person bike in our household. We also had hoped that our daughter could ride on the back deck with our son. This was unrealistic; although there’s plenty of room, she is too young and too adventurous for that to be safe unless she’s strapped into a child seat. The can-do folks at Everybody Bikes could probably figure out a way to convert one of the Xtracycle UteDecks to a MinUte deck (the MinUte deck is 24”, while the Ute’s is 31” and the Xtracycle’s is 28”) and use it to mount a seat for her behind our son, and we might still do that. But if the kids were 4 and 6 instead of 2 and 6, both of them could ride on the deck without adding seats. As expected, this bike isn’t grab-and-go as a commuter; Matt needed lights and he has to strap up his pants. He works in an office with a dress code and no shower, so on days when everyone’s in a suit for foreign visitors, it’s easier to take the train. I think that this would be true for any bike though. The cargo bags, which arrived two months later, lack a shoulder strap so they’re hard to carry around once off the bike. We had initially thought that we’d both get MinUtes, but we now feel that doesn’t make sense given our kids’ ages and our daughter’s need for a child seat.

MAYBE: We are not sure if it will fit on the bus rack, although I suppose it’s a good sign that we haven’t yet had to try. Standard bus racks apparently fit bikes with a wheelbase of up to 46” (I had to look this up) and his frame’s wheelbase is…  46.4” (the 18” MinUte frame’s wheelbase is about an inch shorter). I’ve been told that people have squeezed recumbent bikes with 47-48” wheelbases on Muni racks, though, so, possible? Further updates as events warrant.

All parts on board (it’s not cold, but my son likes looking like a ninja)

YES: There is a lot to love about this bike. Matt has no problem taking the hills with our son on the back and with cargo. Granted, for the first week he came home drenched with sweat every day even after taking the elevator (which doesn’t cover the whole hill). But it’s gotten easier; he now only rarely takes the elevator and doesn’t always need a shower, and we live at the top of a really steep hill (veloroutes says 16% if you take the direct route), a situation that has led to my classifying any city in the world other than La Paz, Bolivia, as “flat.” And as promised, the MinUte is basically the length of a normal bike—my bike is ~68” front to back and the MinUte is ~73”. It fits in the elevator (barely) and it fits in Matt’s cubicle. Matt enjoys riding it to work and finds it pretty nimble, although it’s definitely heavy. He gets a lot of envy and questions from other dads with Trail-a-bikes riding on Market Street, one of the more challenging parts of his route to the Financial District, who say that the bike+trail-a-bike is often frighteningly unstable and that hauling an extra bike length in back is limiting, especially after dropping off the kid. Based on that feedback alone we’re glad we didn’t go with that option (or for that matter, with a trailer). With the foot-pegs and stoker bars the bike looks made for two riders, but when our son’s not on board the bike looks like a heavy-duty commuter; no need to add a child seat. After our son’s drop-off Matt can use the back deck to carry more stuff, not that there’s ever been any need for that given that the bags hold a ton already. When we’re riding together even a single bag swallows everything from extra jackets and clothing to both U-locks to whatever we buy while we’re out, and he can grab things without getting off the bike; it has the capacity of a trailer without any of the hassles involved in hauling a trailer in the city. Our son can easily ride the back deck until middle school if he wants to, and his sister can ride there once he’s an independent rider.

The MinUte isn’t the bike for everyone—I doubt you could fit two child seats on the deck—but we like it very much. I’m sure that it can carry less than a standard longtail, but it holds plenty for a small urban family, and it’s much more adaptable because it fits in small spaces like Matt’s cubicle. For new bikers like us, it’s been a nice entrée into cargo/family biking, precisely because it’s short enough that it’s possible to take it everywhere a normal bike could go. The thought of getting a big bike as our first bike was kind of scary. It is also easy to carry a kid (maybe two) and cargo without having to figure out how to add accessories like a trailer, another thing that felt kind of scary. And it is definitely a conversation starter, particularly with our son on board. Family biking is still enough of an oddity in San Francisco that even at events with valet bike parking, where it’s safe to say you’ll see a lot of bicycle diversity, people are always asking us about our bikes and where we got them. This bike was so much fun for Matt and our son that my daughter and I grew jealous. One day a couple weeks after they’d started riding, my son leaned over at dinner, patted my hand, and said, “It’s okay, mommy. You can get your own bike soon.”

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