Your cargo bike options are about to get electrified, offering what I think is a a real, all around car replacement. Earlier this year, Trek announced it was pulling it’s Gary Fisher brand under the Trek name and dubbing it the Gary Fisher Collection. One of the new bikes announced with this name shuffling was the Transport, a bike barring a striking resemblance to the Kona Ute. Trek took things to their natural next step by also announcing they would offer an electric version of the Transport to give you that extra push up hills.

On the other side of the pond, a new prototype electric bakfiets was presented at Eurobike. This is one of those developments that makes you wonder what took so long. Bakfiets have long been the big kahuna when it comes to carrying things by bike. Their huge buckets and design putting cargo low and infront of you made them a great option. Plus they are almost always built with fenders, full chain guards, locks, and dynamo lights making them ideal for everyday use. Unfortunately, they are the heaviest of cargo bikes and are usually pair with internal hubs that have limited gear range. This is probably one of the reasons their popularity has been limited to flat countries like The Netherlands and Denmark.

At Eurobike, Dutch designer Wytze van Mansum introduced his prototype of an electric bakfiets that is set for production in the near future under the Urban Arrow brand. You may remember van Mansum from his very cool Dutchess protoype made last year. In addition to all the regular goodness of the bakfiets, he has used lighter materials and designed a clever built-in lights. Pair the electric motor with actually including cup holders, and you just might have a cargo bike mainstream American could really get into. Exciting!

Finally as with any rising products, you soon will have those wanting to ride the trend with no business in the industry. They provide products that are usually heavy on style and light on substance. Enter the fine folks at Puma who are producing their version of a cargo bike called the Mopion. Aside from the color choices inspired by Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, the Mopion really is a half hearted attempt at fullfiling the needs of utility cycling. There is storage in a reasonable sized front rack (though no where near the hauling capacity of long tails or bakfiets), however the design comes from Biomega, who specializes in “urban bike design” with almost no urban utility in their other designs. Wanting to ride after dark or when the road is wet? You’ll be a mud splatter ninja rider. Yes you can add lights and fenders aftermarket, but curiously there appears to be no braze-ons for fenders on this bike. To each his own, but you’d think they’d give you the option to add gear to make the bike useful. Update: I’ve had a chance to see a more detailed picture of the bike at BikeHugger, and it looks like there are braze-ons for fenders and a rear rack. I take back my earlier snarky remarks. While I’d like fenders and lights to be standard, this does look like a pretty cool light duty cargo bike. Still, more bikes on the road capable of carrying things the better, and Puma’s entry hopefully signals more cargo bikes to come.

I got my bicycle stolen some time between 10:30 PM last [Monday] nightand 8:30 AM this morning. It has a black GT mountain bike frame and hybrid tires, a green/blue sticker with white letters that say, “MAKE BIKE NOT CAR.”

It has upright, moustache handlebars with black grips that have white stars. It has a black milk crate bungee corded to the back.

Please keep your eyes out for it and watch out for your own stuff.  TIS THE SEASON FOR THEIVERY!!!

That’s a real bummer, and please let Nadia know if you think you’ve seen this bike. ATXBS is reporting some other bikes recently being stolen so it might not be a bad idea to revisit our primer on securing your bike or some of the other less conventional methods of theft deterrents.

The Copenhagen Wheel. Image courtesy of the SENSEable City Lab

Seeing as we can not go a day this week without mentioned Copenhagen in some way, MIT introduced a new product yesterday that could make this whole bike theft thing moot: The Copenhagen Wheel. This standard wheel with a electric assist hub can be installed on virtually any conventional bike and captures energy from pedaling and braking. When you need that extra energy to get up to speed or up hills, you can engage the motor as an assist. The Copenhagen Wheel also interacts with your smart phone recording distances and routes so you can keep track of workouts or share rides with friends.

These are all cool features. My favorite part of the Copenhagen Wheel though is that if the bike is stolen, you can send a message to it, and it will engaged at the highest resistance in the hub and text you with its location. Pretty slick!

No word yet on when or if this will become a consumer product.

Well, not a day had passed when I came across the trailer for this new film “Beauty and the Bike.” The documentary interviews several young British women about why they don’t cycle and exposes them to the cycling infrastructure and great bikes of Continental Europe. Britain embraced car culture more than any other Western European country after WW II, so this film serves as an interesting reference for our country’s struggles to make space for people over cars. The fight to just get bike lanes painted in this movies sounds oh too familiar. The film appears to anecdotally support the ideas behind the research: women want to feel safe, find biking convenient, and ride a bike that is stylish and allows them to wear whatever they want.

Their discoveries of the ease and simplicity of travel by bike appears to reawaken the joy of cycling. More on the film here which is scheduled to premier in England on December 9. We are being sent a copy and hope to have a review in the coming weeks.

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As a dedicated transportation cyclist and builder of city bikes, I have been pretty disappointed by what the bicycle industry has attempted to offer the U.S. market as utility or transportation bikes. The offerings have inevitably been a variation on the mountain bike or fixed/single speed bike or both. If we are wanting anyone other than the already dedicated cyclist to regularly replace car trips with trips by bike, these products leave a lot to be desired.

The Dutchess concept includes integrated lights, fenders, and rack. Image courtesy of Cartlon Reid.

The fact of the matter is that most people just want to get from point A to B in regular clothing in the cheapest, most efficient way possible. They don’t see themselves as urban warriors or racers. It is also true that the majority of trips people take are less than 5 miles from their house. It would seem like the bicycle would be a great match to this, but it has to be the right bicycle for people who happen to ride bikes (as opposed to cyclists) to use them regularly. Unfortunately, usually these folks either purchase a low quality, desposible bike from a big box store or get something performance oriented foisted upon them at the local bike shop.

On the up side, the bike industry is slowly catching on with several serious attempts at offering true transportation bikes showing up at Interbike this year. Now, BikeBiz is reporting that Cannondale is entering the fray with a concept bike called the Dutchess. Considering Cannondale’s pathetic presentation of the urban bike at this year’s Interbike, there is a lot to like here. Based on the Dutch city bike concept, Cannondale modernizes the look with brushed aluminum and integrated lights, fenders and rack. This yields a bike they say is around 30 pounds, a shockingly low weight for so much utility. Full chain guard and drum brakes are also included, a practical, low maintenance touch that is pretty universally ignored on U.S. city bikes. Curiously, this bike also has a very radically oversized bottom bracket with a huge open space in the middle. One assumes this was done as a wow factor for a concept as I know of no one actually making something like this right now.

All the functionality of a Dutch bike, but why the "sit up and beg" geometry? Image courtesy of Carlton Reid.

It’s not all good. Cannondale kept the hybrid geometry that yields the sit up and beg riding position instead of the highly comfortable fully upright, arms at the side position of a true Dutch bike. Also, the marketing material on this assumes a gender bias in the design. “Designed for women keen to express their style amongst the fast paced and ever changing urban vibe, the Dutchess brings modern lines to the environmentally conscious whilst at the same time offering longevity and low maintenance.” I know us men can be kind of bone headed, but since when is having a well functioning, nice looking city bike a women’s specific design? I know we have a North American gender prejudice on step through frames, but this gender design designation is inspired by 19th century hoop skirts, not 21th century transportation needs. When you are carrying things or in stop and go traffic, the step through is a hard design to beat as our European brethren have learned. Finally, a kickstand is curiously absent from the mix. Ever tried to load some groceries on a bike with no kickstand? Do it once, and you’ll throw all concern about Fred-dom out the window and strap one on.

Short comings aside, Cannondale’s Dutchess concept is a welcome 21st century take on the tradition Dutch city bike. When you think about the needs of an average person just wanting a bike for transportation (regular cloths, low maintenance, low physical impact, short distances, carrying stuff), the Dutch design has a lot to offer and more refinement is great to see. I’d say the biggest down side to this bike is that it is not available for sale to the public right now.

In April during one of my first ventures to the Sunset Valley Farmer’s Market with the Violet Crown Cycles tent, I met an individual who loved the look and functionality of my Ferguson city bikes but really wanted some form of electric bike. He initially asked me about a solar powered pedal assist option, but I indicated that I thought a drive train powered system would be much more efficient and economical.

We had an ongoing conversation over the next three months via the telephone and e-mail to narrow down the bicycle he wanted. Initially, he wanted a standard Ferguson bike with an internal hub and pedal assist. The first challenge we faced was combining the internal hub with a standard bicycle frame. There are pedal assist motors built into hubs, but they are currently always paired with a traditional external derailleur. Other systems use a secondary chain drive but require non-traditional frames to accommodate this system. After a bit of research, I recommended the Stokemonkey system produced by Clever Cycles, a Portland transportation cycling shop I visited last year.

The Stokemonkey was designed to work with Xtracycle compatible frames and Free Radical conversion kits. The customer was initially resistant to the long tail concept wanting as normal a looking bike as possible. I offered to build a custom rack on a long tail but suggested going with the Xtracycle platform as the company is always coming up with new accessories. This would give the customer a lot more flexibility to change the utility of his bike in the future (plus I’m a big fan of the Xtracycle.)

Once we settled on the drive train and long tail platform, it was down to the design. Fortunately, Xtracycle has made their design open source in the last year saving me much time in measuring everything out. Surly is the only company currently making a mass produced Xtracycle frame, the Big Dummy. I took a look at their design to see how they tackled the design issues, but ended up going my own way wanting a little more classically styled frame. My initial design involved a series of long double stays on the back, however one set of stays had to be replaced in the design with a single oversized tube to hold the heavy Stokemonkey motor and its brackets.

One odd bit from the Xtracycle design recommendations was the statement that horizontal drop outs in no way could be used with the design. Since I was going with an internal hub, this would be a bit of a problem meaning I’d have to put a chain tensioner on the bike. One of the reasons I like internal hubs is for the clean chain lines. I was using 26 inch wheels and since the design is meant to accommodate larger 700c wheels, there was plenty of room to put horizontal drop outs on this bike which I did.

I have to say I am quiet happy with the final results, but getting there was quiet a chore. I had estimated the build time would take about 50% longer than one of my normal bikes, but there was an awful lot going on with this bike and the build time on this bike took twice as long as estimated. Part of this was developing the system for building the rear of the frame. This was my first long tail frame, and I build my bikes without a jig (not that a conventional jig would have helped me.) My alignment table was just barely long enough for the frame which also became a little unwieldy to work with in my smallish workshop. I’m not in any hurry to start building tandems!

The customer opted for the midnight blue and had the chain guard, stem and fenders powder coated to match the frame. This yielded one of the better looking electric bike on the road (For some reason, the makers of e-bikes produce some of the ugliest bikes I’ve ever seen.) At first, I was a little nervous about installing the Stokemonkey system as this was my first e-bike. Luckily, the system is very straight forward with easy to understand instructions from the Clever Cycles site. Stokemonkey uses a second chain drive on the left side of the bike that engages when you turn the rev switch on the handle bars. The sensation is interesting, similar to that of a fixed gear bike. You feel the pedals continue to push even though you are no longer pressing the pedals. The entire red motor unit spins which is a little disconcerting at first, but the system itself is quiet and intuitive.

I let my wife take it for a spin around the block and she immediately started talking about getting rid of our car. She rides to work on an Xtracycle with my son on the back but has a hard time with the hills and longer trips. I think the Stokemonkey makes this more practical than standard e-bikes because it is paired with the Xtracycle platform meaning you can carry a weeks’ worth of groceries and 1-2 children on the back. For those looking to go car free with children, I’d give the Stokemonkey/Xtracycle combo a serious look. As for myself, I will be adding both the Xtracycle frame and Stokemonkey to my Ferguson line options for those wanting more in transportation cycling utility.

Gary Fisher Simple City step through

It was only a couple years ago that when you walked into a bike shop looking for a commuter, you would be recommended a recreationally designed mountain bike or hybrid. Not only was the riding position and inevitable suspension fork not well suited to the purpose, these bikes were generally ugly and often the useful bits like fenders and a rack were either an afterthought or a required extra purchase of usually ill fitting accessories.

Well, transportation cycling is the red-headed stepchild no longer with the industry discovering a new market called “Urban.” Initially, the focus of Urban cycling was emulating fixed gear bikes. Whether a straight up fixed gear or performance oriented single speed, the answer the bike industry was giving us was you need to ride a minimalist bike that most riders would find either very difficult to ride in traffic or not very adept at terrains that don’t mimic the Netherlands (read “flat.”) For the most part lights, fenders, chain guards and racks were again left off. An industry always focused on racing and performance just couldn’t let go their prejudices of speed over utility.

It may seem like I am harping on the subject, but I think for transportation cycling to work for people, you need to be able to wear regular cloths, carry your stuff, and be seen after dark. A bike that doesn’t do all of these things at least adequately out of the box does not deserve the title transportation bike, city bike, “Urban” or whatever the hell you want to call it. Other types of bikes can be made to perform this function through retrofits, but they are not as good at the job. They certainly should not be sold to a customer for that purpose.

Breezer Uptown

Things are changing in bike world and it appears bicycle manufacturers are starting to think about how people will actually use transportation bikes in design. Since they pioneered the mountain bike craze 30 years ago, it is only fitting that Gary Fisher and Joe Breeze have been on the forefront of producing true utility bikes on a large scale with new products in the last year. The Breezer Uptown 8 offers a full equipped city bike down to dynamo hub lighting and frame lock in a utilitarian package while Fisher’s Simple City offers a lower cost, more stylish bikes that leave out some must have features like lights and racks at the lower product level. I should also say that Electra was a couple years ahead of everyone with their Amsterdam model. It’s equipped with lower end parts and has not been without issues, but their entry price point was certainly attractive and showed there was a market for useful bikes.

The Globe Live, part of Specialized's new urban bike division

This summer we saw Specialized and Trek follow suit with new product lines aimed straight at the car replacement market. Specialized revamped its Globe line, a previously ho-hum commuter in the mountain bike with slicks approach, into a separate product division. Of course, the ubiquitous fixie was included in this “Urban” lineup, but also included were two sides of the same coin, the Haul and Live. Both are upright riders with fenders with one having a larger rear rack and the other a large front rack.  (Read the great product overview article at BikeHugger for more on the Globe line.) Trek recently rolled out the Belleville as part of their EcoDesign project. Offered in a standard diamond or mitxe frame, the Belleville offers some very useful features like dynamo hub and large front and rear racks in addition to gimmicky items like zip tie attached saddle covers (supposedly more environmentally friendly allowing you to recycle the cover. Yeah, sure.)

Trek's porteur inspired Belleville.

All of these bikes except the Breezer Uptown fail to nail all of the needed options as well as a traditional Dutch city bike, but they are all promising developments and light years ahead of previous products. I think realizing transportation cyclists do ride after dark and that we need to lock our bikes when we get there would make these bikes even better. In addition to overall better utility, there is also a trend with these bikes away from garish racing graphics as is dominate in other lines. We can credit this in large part to the influence of the current generation of custom builders and the bikes seen at the North American Handbuilt Bike Show. These bikes look good though by necessity they will never have the charm, unique look and tailored fit of a custom hand built bike.

Sure, the big boys are following yet again (where are you Giant?), but the results are nice looking, functional bikes available in large distribution channels at prices a lot of consumers can handle. Getting more people bike commuting or shopping by bike requires safe routes and safe places to park your bike at your destination. Good infrastructure is key but having bikes that make the task easy is just as important. These new products are a promising development in turning America into a biking nation.

“This is not a one day clinic,” Appel says.  “We are offering a comprehensive eight week program that includes three workouts each week.  Our weekday classes, which use a combination of instruction and group workout, are held on vehicle-free courses.  Austin Cycle Camp students learn new skills during the week that they can put to the test each weekend with our group rides.”

Classes are designed to be small and sociable and adapted to the needs of each cyclist. The classes cost $349 for the eight week course. We’ll be sitting in on one of the classes in September and letting you know more about this new service, but if you are in need of any improvement in your cyclist, check them out online.

The iPhone app Gears helps you calculate gear ratios.

Wired magazine recently produced a list of five iPhone applications that you can use with your bike. Most are pretty silly and not practical, but the GPS powered cyclometer Speed could help replace a Garmin with a few more features like an interface with Google Maps or MapMyRide. Also, the Gear Calucator is a cool app for those trying to pick the right gear for their fixed gear or single speed or if you are trying to get just the right gear range for your next epic ride. Read the full article at Wired.

Umberto Dei Regale Aurea - Woman's

Italian city bike maker, Gruppo Bici N.A, has just released their new 2010 line of high end city bikes, Umberto Dei Clodia. Similar to Dutch city bikes but with an Italian flare, these things could give Retrovelos a run for their money. I am a maker and promoter of European city bikes, but it does appear that other than a few models with traditional derailleurs, these are all equipped with single speeds and a coaster brake. They look good, but I think it would be impractical and possibly a little dangerous for our hilly city.

These might go better in Dallas than Austin

What I found even more Italian about this brand is the Gucci style pannier and saddle bags they sell with the bikes. They certainly aren’t my style, but I’m sure they’d go with a leather suit and square toed shoe combo. Che bella!

Image courtesy of BauBike

Here’s Jakobsen’s explanation:

 

Image courtesy of BauBike

The BauBike is inspired by Bauhaus design. It is constructed around the geometric shape of the square and the equilateral triangle. The design is stripped down to clean lines and raw material . . . The design follows a set of formal rules, limiting the geometry to straight lines in a pattern of 60 and 90 degree angles in proportions following the principle of the golden section. 

While the Bauhaus is certainly interesting to look at one wonders about the quality of ride and strength of this frame. The repeated use of the triangle in conventional design was established 100 years ago after much experiementation in bike design. It quite simply offers the strongest frame with the least amount of material. I question a design that follows the rules of a two dimentional art form over three dimensional real world application. Still, it would be fun to watch this bike descend a staircase.

Square handlebars look cool but how will they feel after an hour? Image courtesy of BauBike

This design does appear to be a serious production model with an interesting array of accessories including a passenger seat and custom rack.

Jakobsen has set up an ordering page, but there is currently no pricing or way to order a BauBike, just a contact form.