September 2007 Archives

Today was our first Saturday with the bakfiets, and we kept the bike busy haulin' and transportin' from 8 am to 5 pm.

My wife took it first, riding it to Jazzercize and then to the farmer's market. She had trouble leaving with her cargo of sunflowers due to all the people asking about the cargo bike. Questions from strangers are common with the bakfiets.

Around 11am, I used the quick release to raise the seat from her riding position and started on the next trip. I loaded the bike up with over a 100 lbs of yard waste and headed to the local landfill to drop it off. Wrapping the garbage bags in a tarp kept the bucket extra clean.

Someone commented about my new bakfiets cargo bike this morning that "now I could I haul groceries on the bicycle".

I had been getting groceries fine on my "normal" bike fine for some years. But you couldn't tell that from casually looking the bike.

I never once made a trip where I couldn't bring home everything I wanted. Usually just some saddle bags were used for the hauling, but occasionally a trailer was used to fetch a large bag of dog food.

But on most trips the saddle bags and trailer are left at home, so the carrying capacity isn't visible.

The importance of the bakfiets in the US now is that it is obvious that the bakfiets is built to haul. And it does in fact haul a lot. I believe it's rated to haul about 250 lbs of cargo or kids, plus the weight of the driver. (That's 175 lbs in the bucket, and 75 more on the rear rack).

The name for bags that hang off the side of bikes seems to officially be "panniers" in English. "Panniers" is in-word in bike subculture that most United States folk don't know.

That makes it harder for me to talk about functional bicycling with folks. "Panniers" is a foreign word that makes carrying stuff on a bike sound, well, foreign.

Motorcyclists often call these "saddle bags". That's much more evocative. People generally know the words "saddle" and "bags". It's not a big leap to put them together and visualize what that looks like.

Cyclists who would normally refer to them as panniers would also readily understand "saddle bags", so there's not much of a need to use different terms for the subculture and the broader culture.

I want using a bike as transportation to seem normal. Easily comprehensible. So from now on, if you ask me about hauling stuff on my on bike, I'll tell you I have saddle bags. Like a motorcycle. Or a horse.