Category Archives: Biking

Trailers, longtails, and iBerts, oh my!

Posted on May 24, 2012 | 6 Comments

Last week, I shared some green baby strategies, one of which was, “Wait on it.”  While I’ve done a good job on that in general, there are a few things that I wish I had waited on, one of those being the bicycle trailer.

Despite the fact that we’ve had it for over eight months now, I can still count our “biking with baby” trips using my my hands.  I need both hands, not just one, but still.

Sure, there have been mitigating factors: waiting until Sir was a bit older and had decent head/neck control, ordering the baby supporter accessory, winter weather, carrying the trailer in and out of the basement because we have no garage . . . but enough with the excuses!  An average use of once a month at most?  Not good!

Given that we found a high quality, good condition, used trailer for a reasonable price, I’m not sure it was a bad purchase, at this point it just does not seem like a good purchase, either.

Ever since I saw this post on the Momentum magazine blog, I’ve been thinking about options that don’t involve a trailer.  A longtail bicycle, like the Yuba Mondo featured in that post (and here, as well), seems like a great option.

In my excitement, I dug a little deeper into the world of longtails, and found some reviews and comparisons of various bikes including the Yuba Mondo, Surly Big Dummy, and the XtraCycle Radish.*  Based on our initial research, we lean toward the Yuba for it’s combination of features that meet our needs and being a good value.

A couple weeks after my longtail excitement, I read S’s post on front-mounted seats on Simply Bike.  While I like the idea of a longtail, I’m less excited about the price tag — far more affordable than a car up front and down the road, but still overwhelming to my frugal sensibilities.

With a front-mounted seat, you don’t sacrifice the cargo room on the rear rack as you would with a rear-mounted seat, and you don’t have to deal with the weight and bulk of a longtail (especially a factor in our case, with carrying it up and down stairs).

Also, your little one is right up front, experiencing the ride with you, which appeals to me.  While Sir does not seem to mind riding in the trailer, he doesn’t seem particularly excited about it either, and I can’t really blame him.

When thinking about biking with baby options, front-mount seats were not even on my radar, but based on the post I mentioned above, the main contenders are the Yepp Mini, the iBert, and the Bobike Mini.**

Immediately after reading about front-mount seats, I saw an iBert on Craigslist.  For better or worse, I didn’t feel ready to grab it up without more research on the various options, including which seat styles work with which bicycles, and that seat is now gone.

For now, we’ll continue using the trailer, if less often than I would like.  And I’ll be dreaming about front-mount seats and longtails.

*For more info, check out these resources:
Heavyweight Showdown: Big Dummy vs Yuba Mundo
Cargo Bikes in Momemtum Magazine
Beautiful Bicycles: Yuba Monda Cargo Bike
The Best Cargo Carrying Bikes Of 2012: A Review

**See comments to S’s post for feedback on front-mount seats:
Front mounted bike seat for a child: what are your favorite options?

→ 6 Comments

Posted in Biking

Tagged ,

Dinner & Bikes recap

Posted on May 10, 2012 | Leave a comment

After all my questioning whether or not to attend the StL edition of Dinner & Bikes on Sunday night, and time spent formulating a blog post as I processed things, the event itself was a bit anticlimactic.

But let’s start at the beginning.  I watched the weather forecast with rain and thunderstorms for Sunday and Sunday night all week, afraid that conditions would be such that biking would be inadvisable (I won’t say impossible, because you can theoretically ride a bicycle through most any weather condition, however, we try to avoid riding in severe thunderstorms).

Sunday afternoon arrived hot but dry (as in no rain — plenty humid still), and it looked like there was a good chance the rain and storms would hold off until we were safely back home.  Since we’re not acclimated to riding in the heat yet (and let’s be honest, I haven’t been riding all that much lately, period) we debated biking to MetroLink and using transit for part of the trip.

We left that as an option, but, as I expected, once we started rolling, I voted to keep going.  We were about four miles in when I started thinking fondly of the air-conditioned MetroLink cars, but by then it really didn’t make sense to reroute for that.  We continued on, enjoying the “down” part of getting downtown, and we arrived at our destination having covered eight sweaty miles in about forty-five minutes.

After being tempted by the scent of delicious food during the happy hour portion of the event, we finally got down to business, going through a buffet-style line with a variety of vegan dishes, including three or four that featured tofu, and most with Thai flavors.

The William A. Kerr Foundation hosted the event at their 21 O’Fallon Street building.  Given the mission of the foundation, and the LEED Platinum status of the building, I was disappointed to discover styrofoam plates and plastic forks in the buffet line.  Fortunately, I had my bamboo utensil set in my bag, but it hadn’t crossed my mind that I might need to bring my own plate.  Argh!

Matthew and I agreed that our top two dishes were the coconut tofu with plantain (three o’clock position in above photo) and the eggplant with shitake mushroom (middle of plate).  My compliments to The Touring Vegan Chef, AKA Joshua Ploeg, for a tasty meal.

We met some new cyclist friends over dinner, including the organizer of the StL World Naked Bike Ride, and caught up with old friends.

After dinner came the presentation portion of the event.  Elly Blue kicked things off with a talk on the economics of bicycling.  While she had some good points, from our perspective she was preaching to the choir.

Because of my work with bicycle advocacy and Complete Streets policies, I already know the stats and numbers — how expensive it is to build a mile of urban highway ($39 million on the low side, $65 million on average, even higher in some places) and how much bicycle infrastructure that you could build with that amount of money, the cost of owning and driving a car, etc.

Elly pointed out how the cost of owning and operating a car disproportionately affects people living in poverty, especially women, and how women with children face extra challenges to using bicycles for transportation, which, as a bicycling mama, had me nodding my head in agreement.

I pointed out in my pre-event post that the use of well thought-out, progressive infrastructure can be part of the solution for making bicycling more mainstream, and throughout the presentation, I noted examples of infrastructure that should be universally acceptable: bike corrals (i.e., designated, on-street bicycle parking in front of businesses), way-finding signs for bicyclists and pedestrians, and measures that slow motor vehicle traffic.

By the time we got to the video clip portion of the evening, we were both pretty beat and getting restless.  They started with some clips of bicycle advocacy in Portland, having read Mia Birk’s Joyride, this felt like more familiar territory.

Since a baby-free evening is a precious and rare thing for us, we felt we had reached a point of diminishing returns in staying longer, so we ducked out early.

On our way there, I questioned how many attendees* would actually be biking to “Dinner & Bikes,” given the off-the-beaten-path location and the heat.  Unfortunately, the pessimist in me was correct — the indoor bicycle parking was sadly underutilized.

All-in-all, it was a nice evening.  I’m very glad we biked to the event (the ride home was especially nice), as the biking, along with the food, were definitely the highlights for me.

~~~~~~
*I wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of turn-out.  According to someone from Trailnet (the event sponsor), they sold about one hundred tickets.  It didn’t feel like there were one hundred people in the room — I’d ballpark it at 60-70, but I could be wrong.  I would have loved to see a larger turnout — more people engaging in bike-related activities and getting excited about promoting and increasing bicycle use would be a great thing.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Biking, Food

Tagged ,

Birthday brunch and bicycling

Posted on May 8, 2012 | 4 Comments

We filled my birthday weekend with delicious food and nice (if warmer than my ideal) biking.

We transformed a large Swiss chard harvest into this Quinoa and Kale Swiss Chard Crustless Quiche that I saw on One Hot Stove a few weeks ago, with a side of broiled asparagus to round out the meal.

I doubled the recipe and made two quiches — relatively easy and seriously delicious, all three of us devoured our pieces and went back for seconds.  Matthew said it reminded him of a grown-up take on broccoli-rice casserole.

Good thing Sir likes grown-up food!

For my birthday, I requested chocolate pudding cake, and Matthew executed perfectly (recipe coming later this week).

Later in the day, Sir headed out to Grandma’s for a sleep-over, and we pedaled eight sweaty miles (that I wouldn’t have traded for eight air-conditioned car miles) . . .

Tasty vegan food

. . . to Dinner & Bikes.*

Reflecting the flash

With the sun setting and shadows lengthening, our return ride was a bit cooler, and we further cooled things off with some frozen yogurt.

Despite reading about them for well over a year on other foodie blogs, this was my first trip through a self-serve fro-yo and topping bar — a fun ending to a fun day!

~~~~~

*More on the event in a later post.

→ 4 Comments

Posted in Biking, Food

Tagged , ,

Bicyclists: United we stand, divided . . .

Posted on April 30, 2012 | 8 Comments

Sigh.  I write this with a heavy heart.  What should have been a simple decision to attend a fun bicycle-related event has become much more complicated.

I first heard about Dinner and Bikes over two months ago.  It looked like a great event, uniting my two most-beloved blog subjects with its goal to “bring people together to eat delicious food and get inspired about bicycle transportation.”

However, I assumed that with the need to find care for Sir, attending would be too much of a hassle, something I could have easily done a year ago, but not so much now.  Fast-forward several weeks, and all the cards fell into place for us to have a fun evening, biking to and from the event, and sharing dinner and conversation with fellow bicycling enthusiasts.

Instead of simply buying tickets for the dinner, though, I did a little research to make sure the event was worth our time and money.  Beyond a great goal, and a list of event dates and locations, the information given on the Dinner and Bikes blog was a little sparse, so I followed some of the links for more information on the creators.

One blog in particular, Taking the Lane, seemed promising and interesting, given the title.  Unfortunately, what I found there cast a bit of a shadow on my enthusiasm:

“The great thing about Austin,” commented Joshua, not a bicyclist himself, “is that from the most in-shape to the least fearful, anyone can ride right down the middle of the lane.” He cackled and added, “That doesn’t leave anybody out, right?”

I’ve tweaked Joshua’s slogan slightly for alliteration — “From the most fit to the least fearful.” The anti-bike lane movement is welcome to take it on as its new motto.

While I love biking in St. Louis, I’m already cringing after reading this and Elly’s reviews of other cities, wondering what she’ll say about bicycling here.

Further, if this language, written by one of Dinner and Bike’s coordinators, was representative of what I would find at the event, did I really want to take part?  Would I feel unwelcome and out of place because I think bicyclists should operate their vehicles like other road users?  Would I spend the evening listening to presentations perpetuating the myth that only very fit and very brave people can use bicycles for transportation in places where there is little formal bicycle infrastructure, which goes against my beliefs and experiences and what I teach in Cycling Savvy?

In an attempt to get a bit more information, I consulted my fellow Cycling Savvy instructors — turns out I was opening a real can of worms with my digging, and not my friendly red wigglers, either.

Though I was aware that there are two differing views of cycling advocacy, one that sees infrastructure as the solution and another that encourages bicyclists to become part of traffic and work with the existing road system, my queries revealed this to be not just a friendly debate, but a loaded topic, subject of more than a few hateful and vitriolic blog posts that left me with a heavy heart and a very bad taste in my mouth.

I pose this question to you, my fellow bicyclists and bike advocates: Can we afford this kind of hateful talk?  If no, then why do we allow it to continue?

In the United States, people who use bicycles for transportation are already in the minority (in many places making up less than 1%) of all road users.  If we want to increase the number of people bicycling, make bicycling safe and approachable for all, and [although it is already a pretty darn safe activity] continue to make it safER, we must stand together.

This is not to say that there is not room for debate about various ways to achieve our goals.   I have read and understood the arguments on both sides of this debate, and, like many questions in life, there is probably no one right answer. In order to make any progress we must be at the same table, which means we need to eliminate hostile and divisive discourse and labels and categories such as “anti-bike lane movement,” “vehicularist,” and “infrastructurist.”  Only then can we move forward and find progressive solutions that address the barriers to more people bicycling.

I am a bicyclist.  I am a Cycling Savvy instructor.  I have advocated for Complete Streets policies.  I have drooled (from afar) over the bicycle accommodations and huge bicyclist mode share in places like Copenhagen.  I should not have to question whether there is space for me and my beliefs at a bicycling event.

WE ARE BICYCLISTS — united we ride, divided we fall.

—
Note: In the spirit of uniting with others, I just purchased our tickets for the St. Louis stop of the Dinner and Bikes 2012 Tour.  Anyone want to plan on biking with us to the event?

→ 8 Comments

Posted in Biking

Tagged ,

What’s goin’ on

Posted on April 24, 2012 | 1 Comment

It’s been a little quiet over here, which usually indicates that life has been a little crazy.  We’re all alive and well, or as well as can be with yet another cold virus, courtesy of Typhoid Gabriel.

Friday
In the spirit of getting the bad news out of the way first, I visited the dentist for a routine cleaning.  It was so much fun that I get to go back and see them in two weeks for “a bit of work.”  Unremarkable for many people, perhaps, but this is my First. Cavity. EVER.

The first cavity ever is the equivalent of the first A- or B+ ever, when you kiss your hopes of being the valedictorian of perfect teeth goodbye and start down the path to becoming a toothless old hag.

Saturday
We met with a realtor and made [a low-ball] offer on a house (an offer that we felt was actually reasonable based on average price per square foot, days on market, etc.).

Sunday
I spent Earth Day teaching my first ever Cycling Savvy course — despite my initial lack of enthusiasm toward working on the weekend, I had a blast.  It felt great to put everything that I learned in instructor training last year into use, and teaching others skills and helping build the confidence they need to ride their bicycles more seemed a fitting way to spend Earth Day.

Meanwhile, out at the garden, Matthew put in the tomato plants and then held his breath until Monday morning due to the somewhat unexpected frost advisory.  Fortunately the little plants escaped the evil Mr. Frost.

We also found out that the seller soundly rejected our offer on the house — according to his agent he “almost fainted” when he read it.  Ha!

To him we say, have fun continuing to sit on that property that you’ve been sitting on for over two years during which time the pipes burst due to lack of adequate heating one winter.

As for us, we now have our eyes on something that I ultimately think could work out even better (details to come once we have a bit more info, but I’m already putting the eggs WAY before the chicken).

→ 1 Comment

Posted in Biking, Garden, My Life

Tagged , ,