Cargo Bike Update
I wanted to give a cargo bike update as the kids are bigger and we’ve changed locales.
For reference, we got our Yuba Long Tail Cargo Bike in the spring of 2016 when the kids were 6, 3 and 1. That first summer I had all three kids on the bike. It was quite a load! I think I was hauling about 100 lbs of kid. The youngest sat on the back in a Thule Yepp Maxi Easy Fit Bike Seat. The older two sat in front of him with the Yuba Monkey Bars around them. At that time we mostly used the bike to cruise the sea wall in Vancouver and visit beaches and parks.
I absolutely loved the freedom the bike allowed me that first summer. We could go farther and faster than on foot. With our Go Getter panniers we could haul everything needed for a day at the beach. As a mother of three it was a revelation for getting my brood somewhere that is usually only easily accessible with a car.
The first summer we had the cargo bike we still owned a car. The cargo bike soon took over some of the work of the car: getting us to beaches that were too far to walk to or not easily accessible by transit. When my oldest started at a school a few blocks from our house we no longer used the car enough to justify the cost. So our second year with the Yuba cargo bike we were car free with kids and the Yuba did a little more heavy lifting for errands that were farther afield.
The Family Cargo Bike is Adaptable
The following summer my oldest was starting to ride independently and that lightened the load on the bike. But he was a new rider and sometimes needed a break or couldn’t quite make it on his own steam to the destination. Cue cargo bike awesomeness. There’s a system called ‘bag and drag’ with cargo bikes where you put the tow bikes front wheel inside your pannier. *See photo below. I add in a bungy chord for stability and boom, I’m now towing a bike. With my bike!
The tough parts of our cargo bike usage in the city were mostly with the location of the bike storage room in our condo building. Bike parking was always at a premium and not every spot fit our big bike. The bike room was on the first floor of the underground parking and behind two heavy fire doors. It was challenging to get the cargo bike out with three young kids along. In fact, I would say bike parking was our biggest barrier to family cycling.
The other reason we didn’t use our cargo bike with great frequency is that we could easily walk most places. Our city lifestyle in Vancouver was tailored to use as many easily walkable amenities and services as possible. So the cargo bike really was our fun vehicle rather than a commuter.
Riding a Cargo Bike in a Small Town
Enter our move to a small town in the fall of 2017. I actually debated even bringing the bike: there are very few sidewalks and no protected bike lanes. How would we safely ride our cargo bike here? Of course, a few weeks in I saw that we would be using the cargo bike even more in the small town.
It’s exceedingly easy to get our bikes out of our garage here. That’s one reason we are riding so much more in this small town. I just roll the cargo bike into our attached garage to put away and roll it out when we go. It’s a breeze. Hence why I used the bike to haul soccer gear to practice as you can see from the photo at the top.
We’re also riding more because it’s often too long to walk. We no longer have a walk score in the high 90s. We can walk to the kid’s school and into town but if we are doing that multiple times a day it ends up being 2-3 hours of walking a day. The family bike is very efficient for time.
The low and slow traffic here makes for easy riding. I was really worried about not having bike lanes but that was quite ignorant of me. There is a lot less traffic on the road here and driver’s don’t seem to be in as big a hurry. Calm traffic and less traffic has made me feel very safe riding on the roads with my kids.
Three years in and our long tail cargo bike is proving more versatile and useful than I expected.
The other fun or interesting thing about riding a cargo bike in a small town: everyone knows us by our bike. We’re the only cargo bike in town and we’re kind of a spectacle at times. Lots of people stop me to ask about the bike. And I often meet people for the first time and they say, “you’re that family with the big orange bike with the kids on it.” Yep, that’s us.
We have another three or four years of hauling kids by bike left. But I see us keeping our long tail cargo bike beyond that as it’s such a versatile and fun bike. I can bring the kids bike’s to school for them to ride home if they didn’t ride that morning. And the hauling capacity is really useful for grocery shopping, general errands and long days at the park. It’s also a really comfortable bike to ride for me with a more upright position and an easy set to the handlebars. So happy we took the plunge to get one of these bikes!
We’ve contemplated this thanks to your first cargo bike post! Thanks for the update, it’s great to hear! Right now my husband has a killer commute and so he drives nearly an hour each way. I’m home with our two kids (age 2 & 4) and use our wagon with the off-road wheels to walk around town. But grocery shopping and soccer? That’s a lot of capacity! That’s amazing!
They’re a big investment money wise but if you start using it instead of your vehicle there’s savings to be had. We’re trying during our bike season (March to November) to ride as much as possible instead of using our car. So it saves in gas and wear and tear on our vehicle. And yes, fantastic to haul big things with this bike! Really increases options for what we can do with it and where we can go.
I would really love it if you would post links on where to buy!
Yuba Cargo bikes is the maker of our bike. They are a great company based out of California. They also now have a ‘box bike’ called the Supermarche with the kids riding in front. I believe you can order online with shipping in North America. You can also visit a local bike store and see if they are distributors of a certain brand of cargo bike. If you happen to be in Chicago or nearby, there’s an awesome company called Four Star Family Cyclery that you can buy and rent lots of different brands and styles of bikes through. Second hand is always a good option too!
I love this!! We live in a townhouse with no garage and I’d say the “set up” and storage of the family bike system is our biggest hurdle too. We store the chariot and the thule seat in the shed outside but the bikes in the basement so it feels like a lot of hauling things in and out everyday. I dream of a garage to just roll it all into, but that isn’t really a practical reason to upgrade to a house with a garage! Haha! Even with a Thule seat and a Chariot I feel like quite the spectacle in our neighborhood! My husband just got a new job really close to home so this fall will be our first time venturing into the world of bike commuting with kids – we will both ride out bikes to work and the chariot/bike seat combo means that either of us will be able to pick the kids up from daycare. It’s all sounds great now, but I hope we will be able to actually make it all work!
Love reading about all your new adventures 🙂
Shelly, it really is a dream to just roll the bikes into the garage. I admire your resolve to bike with some hurdles to getting on the road. And that is awesome that you are bike commuting this fall. I’ll have to check in and see if you bike through the snow. I’ve been too chicken to do the ‘Viking biking’ thing.
Oh my gosh this is so cool! I love the cargo bike. I have never seen one before now. We just moved to a super rural area, but I always dreamed of going down a car when living in suburbia. I wish I had read this post two years ago! It would have saved us a lot of gas money and probably have gotten me in really awesome shape!
Oh it’s a real leg burner. I don’t think our middle kid will be riding independently for another year or two so until then… it takes a lot of mom power to get up hills.
I wish more families knew about cargo bikes because they can act as the second car in a lot of situations. They are usually at least a few thousand dollars to get into – usually more – but compared to the cost of owning, insuring, maintaining and gas – they’re actually pretty reasonable.