May 2010 Archives

This is Ron's solution for getting a 32 foot ladder home from the store.

The store is only about 2 miles away, and the ladder weighs only about 50
pounds, so using a using 4,000 car seems like a particularly inefficient
solution, assuming Ron had actually found vehicle he could use that was capable
of carrying such a long load.

One alternative would have been to have it delivered by truck for $60, adding
20% to the cost. He could have potentially strappped it to the top of a large
truck or van, which could have involved driving to the van location, driving
the van to the store, driving home, driving back to the van the location, and
driving back home again. The time involved in that process could easily take longer
than just riding to the store and back by bike.

By using this Bikes-at-Work trailer, Ron was able to efficiently accomplish the task and enjoy a nice ride as well. Since the ladder was not particularly heavy, it didn't require a great amount of effort to carry it on the trailer.

The Bikes-at-Work comes in three sections. Extra sections can be left at home
if you don't need them, and the axle location can changed to suit the task at hand.
Here we put the axle all the way at the rear of the 8 foot trailer so that it easily
balances the 16 foot load.

Each 12 inch ceramic tile weighed 4 pounds and we needed 850 of them. That’s 3,400 lbs in tile alone. The floor project would also require about 12 bags of mortar at 50 pounds each. That brings the total weight of the project to 2 tons now— 4,000 pounds, before we even add the grout.

Of course, I calculated what it would take to carry all this on my bike. The tile alone would take 17 trips at 200 pounds per trip.

I decided cargo biking wasn’t practical for this job, but I still had the opportunity to have most of the material pass through my hands. I helped load and unload much of the 50 pounds bags of mortar, and two car-trailer loads of tile. By the end, I felt well acquinated with the full impact of 4,000 pounds. I could feel in my bones the amount of energy it took to move that material.

And for a least a moment, I appreciated cars for this. They were far better for carrying 2 tons of materials than a bike would be.

And that’s when it hit me like a ton of ceramic tile. The average American car weighs 2 tons.

Recently Dave Deming put his Yuba Mundo cargo bike to the test by attempting to haul about 1,000 bananas on it— about 400 lbs of them.

The tagline for the Yuba Mundo bike is “affordable mobility”, which translates to a cargo bike that starts at $1100 and is built to haul 440 lbs of cargo.