Brainstorming ways to get others on their bikes

So it's been a couple of months since I got my Yuba. I'm enjoying riding around carrying stuff and making a few shopping trips here and there. Lots of folks have asked me questions about it, and I try to keep some cards or stickers on hand that advertise Cycle9 so maybe they can get some more business, create a new cargo-cyclist, create some more business, and on and on.

Lately, however, I've been thinking how great it would be to have a semi-organized ride on Saturday mornings or afternoon to go to the local Farmer's Market. Every weekend in my area from June through September there is some kind of charity ride or race with a variety of routes that include the century crowd and the 25- to 35-mile crowd. That's great for people that want the competition or the joy of helping out the Charities. I'm curious if there are folks who would enjoy a leisurely ride to the farmer's market to get some healthy exercise and carry back some fine locally-grown food to provide healthy eating choices for their families. For me, it would be fun to have a group ride (safety in numbers) to get in a dozen or so miles of riding, plus the fun family time of cruising around the Farmer's Market and checking out the goods.

Another thing I've considered is an informal guided tour of the local Greenways. Many people I run into have no idea about how many miles there are, or where they go, or what's near the Greenways that might be interesting. It makes me curious how many MORE people would ride if they knew what venues were readily available and how nicely kept they are.

Another useful trip I've considered is using a bicycle to pickup food for the local Open Door Ministry. They serve hundreds of meals twice a day, and they must surely need the ingredients for those meals to come from someplace. It's about 10 miles from the Open Door to the Farmer's Market, so it could easily be pedaled, and using a cargo bike, easily transport big boxes of produce and fruits back. I wonder how interested some of the homeless folks would be in earning a bike by making that ride several times during the week, to bring back food to the place where they eat. Maybe an opportunity there, get some non-profit or a local philanthropist to donate cargo bikes for use by the people to help bring in their own food. Hmmm. Interesting.

Ride of Silence

I rode in the local Ride Of Silence on the 20th. Here's a link to local coverage: http://tinyurl.com/rideofsilence09news14

You can see me, in the video of riders, very briefly ride by with my VA Tech jersey on.

I hope you all had the opportunity to participate in this type of Ride in your locale. I think it's very important to try and raise awareness of motorists. One nagging question about the Ride is this: when we're riding en mass through the streets, and somebody on the sidewalk or in their yard yells out "hey what are you doing" or "what is this for" we really can't yell back "it's the Ride of Silence to honor cyclists who have been injured or killed by Motorists!"

That's unfortunate. Because I think many of the people who see a few hundred cyclists, escorted by Police --thank you Greensboro Police Department-- riding down the street are genuinely interested in what it's all about. I heard some guy tell the kid beside him on the sidewalk "that's that critical mass thing." Wrong. It's not at all like critical mass. I hope the Ride Of Silence never gets the bad press that Critical Mass rides seem to pick up. I've ridden in three of Ride Of Silence events. I think next year I'll make it a point to curl off from the group and provide a little education to interested onlookers. I might even suggest to our local organizing group that we provide some little cards that we could hand off to people, not pepper the streets like a ticker-tape parade, but individually hand them to people who show interest. We even had a group of three kids that fell in line and rode with us for a mile or so. It was two kids on BMX-style bikes with another kid riding on the rear pegs of one bike. None of them had helmets, but at least they were interested. Again, most of us kept quiet even though they asked repeatedly what this was all about. We rode right by a huge "celebration in the park" in the downtown area where one of the local news shows was celebrating a "birthday" and had a bunch of tents and stuff about two blocks from our start/finish point. There were numerous opportunities to promote the Ride if we had something to hand out, since we weren't supposed to talk once the Ride started. One other option might be to ride around the local ballpark. Our local team had a home game on Wednesday night, started at 7:05, and the park is just a few blocks from the start/finish point. That's my very small gripe. We may have missed some opportunities to make a greater impact. Overall I really enjoyed the Ride and certainly enjoyed seeing all the cyclists out on such a wonderful evening. The temps were just right, with not much wind. The route was great, and the Police made it go very smoothly for us.

If you get the opportunity to participate next year, please do. The more cyclists seen on the road, the better our steel-clad bretheren will be acclimated to moving in concert with cyclists, rather than in opposition.

Pulled the Trigger! I joined the cargo cyclists.

I finally did it, after months of contemplation, research and living vicariously through others on the 'net, I've bought my first cargo bike. I got a Yuba Mondo from my friends at Cycle9 in Carrboro, NC...a stone's throw from UNC - Chapel Hill.

My reasons for choosing the Yuba are as follows:

Wanted a bike that could easily handle the load of two kids - nearly 100 pounds total presently.

Wanted solid frame, rather than a two-piece item.

Wanted least expensive that met the above needs.

I had rented a yuba last fall that came equipped with a front hub-motor. It was a nice setup but a little heavy and seemed like it had a noticeable amount of drag when not using the motor for assist. A motorized Yuba with a good long-life battery would have cost too much money for me to spend right now, so I went with the out-of-the-box basic 6spd model, from 2008. That saved me a little money, and some wait time for the 2009. So now I'm hooked! This thing rocks.

My son and I have already taken our maiden voyage, a short trip of about 2 miles to our nearby Greenway, then another mile or two on the Greenway and back to the house. It was great. He loved it, and wants to do it every night now. He's 50 pounds, so the uphills are a little slow with my old engine and pistons, but I can do it without getting off and walking, so it can only get better from here.

Here's a pic (on my poor phone-cam) that shows the cool gazebo and lake where we stopped to throw / skip some rocks in the water.

You aficionado's of the Yuba will note the Xtracycle FreeRadical bags on there. Right, they don't fit exactly the same way on the Yuba's rack as on the xtra V-racks. I bought a used set of these for about $60, and I took a hint from someone on the RootsRadical forum, and found an old 2 ft. wooden dowel lying in the garage, put the FreeRad loops up through the Yuba's frame and slid the rod/dowel through the loops on top of the Yuba's top rack. It holds just fine, and the buckle straps at the bottom corners of the FreeRad wrap around the bottom bars of the Yuba's lower racks. My son can put his feet in the FreeRad bags which helps assuage the fear of him getting his feet caught in the spokes - which he did last year with the rented one, due to a father-son error in judgement on the fitness of our home-made seating contraption. Live, hurt, learn. It's part of being a boy/man. As my colleague at work likes to say, "you gotta be tough when you're dumb."

So, at about 1/3 the cost of a Big Dummy, I have a steel 440-pound capacity cargo bike that I can easily fit a toddler and a 7 yr-old on, and still have room to load stuff and use my bike instead of my motor-vehicle to go places. I don't have to think about fancy components to satisfy my "build" and I think there are some fine plans for Do-It-Yourself seating arrangements that will pass the new safety inspector (mom.) I've sent one of the FreeRads to our friendly neighborhood seamstress to see if she could open the loops and create some type of closure for them, so I can maybe ditch the dowel. I'll use them both for awhile and determine which method of attachment works the best.

I won't win any speed records, but I never did before on any other bike, so I can live with that. Getting the family involved in some Pedal-powered activities is what I'm after.

I'll try to post a little more regularly now that I've got something to talk about. :) And I'll get some better pics up of the two attachment methods.