When cyclists have babies, wanting to incorporate the kids into the usual transportation routine is pretty natural. Some find it a necessity.
Vancouver resident AJ Andrien’s second son, Mister, used to wail inconsolably every time they went on a car trip. “You know there’s that baby thing where you drive them around the block and they go to sleep?” Andrien says. “He was like, ‘I’m strapped in, and nobody’s holding me, and when I scream they can’t pick me up because they’re driving.’”
So she and her family (which also includes partner Adrian Estergaard and Gareth, 12) sold their car and decided to get around by low-carbon means instead.
“You put him in the bike seat and he’s asleep in five minutes,” Andrien says of Mister, now two. “He’s just a bicycle baby.” The family owns several bikes, including a Breezer Villager equipped with an XtraCycle, a BoBike seat, and a Wilderness Energy power system.
The Andrien/Estergaard family is part of a new generation that’s happily realizing that having “two kids” does not always end in “and a minivan.”
The birth of Chicago resident and avid cyclist Jane Healy’s first child put a temporary halt to her riding. But after her second child came along, she received a bike trailer as a gift. “That was my epiphany moment,” Healy says. “I took the kids out for a ride and thought ‘Wow, this is so cool.’”
For the Healys, cycling is not only important for the environment, it’s important for health. “We live in a low-income community with a really high rate of obesity,” Jane says. “I want my kids to be physically active.”
Today, she leads a popular Friday night bike ride for her own three children (Will, 10, Katie, 8, and Genevieve, 4) and up to 15 other neighbourhood kids.
The kids love it, and the neighbourhood parents like it too. “They’re happy we’re doing something positive.”
In the 1990s, Morna McLeod rode her bike to work 45 minutes each way – and she didn’t let a little thing like pregnancy stop her. She cycled till she was practically “kicking myself in the stomach,” she laughs. Many years later, Morna, her partner David Firman, and their daughters Adrienne, 14, and Kelly, 10, are still car-free.
“We had all these different stages,” McLeod says. “We had one kid in the trailer, and then one kid in the trailer and one kid on the bike backseat, and then we had two kids in the trailer, then one in the trailer and one on the trail-a-bike.”
Firman says half the battle of being a car-free family is simply deciding to make it work. “There are two kinds of opposing halves: one is planning carefully, and the other is just to assume you can do it. You’re going to be able to get around without a car, which isn’t always bikes. But you’re going to be able to get around.”
Two years ago, when their son Lucas came along, Victor Cuevas and Julia Brown wanted to keep cycling. But the bike trailer was out. “In Julia’s mind it was safer to have Lucas where she could see him rather than dragged behind,” says Cuevas, “especially in heavy traffic.”
That’s when Cuevas stumbled on the bakfiets, or “box bike,” which puts the child and cargo in front of the rider. He imported one from Holland, and when Lucas was old enough, they took him for his first ride. “He loved it from day one. We went down the seawall and he was just pointing at things, going, ‘boat’, ‘bike’, pointing at people.”
Cuevas’s store, Rain City Bikes, was the first to distribute the bakfiets in Canada. “We had a couple of moms roll in with a kid on the front, a kid on the back, and panniers… the bikes were unsteady and wobbling on a kickstand,” says Cuevas. “That’s the perfect customer, somebody who’s outgrown the bicycle and needs something more.”
Families who cycle are passionate about the benefits. “Cycling teaches kids how to be independent and how to get around on their own power,” says Jane Healy. Her children are also “really clued in to the seasons” because of how much time they spend outdoors.
But cycling with the family isn’t always peachy keen, and it changes as kids go through different stages. Carellin Brooks bikes her six-year-old daughter, Carson, to school on a trail-a-bike almost every day. “She hates it,” Brooks admits. “She would like to just sit on the back [and not pedal], and I’m not strong enough.” Another thing Brooks finds frustrating: the lack of bike racks at her daughter’s school. “It rains for nine months of the year here; it’s crazy not to have covered bike racks.”
According to Jane Healy, the hardest part about family cycling is going on longer trips with four bikes and a trailer. Being able to take your bike on public transit has made things easier, but, agrees David Firman, it’s “not really designed for family use. There’d be room for just two bikes and then there’d be the trailer.”
But for these families, the good points far outweigh the challenges.
“When you’re cycling, you’re out in the world, you’re engaged with the world in a way you can’t be with a car,” Brooks says.
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Correction
We did not "sell our car."
I have been a member of the Cooperative Auto Network , our local car sharing organization, since 1999. I spent six of those years on the Board of Directors.
Car sharing is one if the Really Good Ideas that is enabling folk to go "car-free" by putting the car in its place: as (a currently way overused) part of a network of available transport options, bicycles being the most joyful and efficient of the lot.
So while we did reduce our car use dramatically (down to once every month or two) when Mister was little and hating it, I have not had a car to sell since 1997. The suggestion that I might have is a little awkward to explain to my colleagues in the alternative transportation world, who have been hearing me burble to the media for nigh on a decade about the joys of not owning/maintaining a private automobile.
Perhaps your reporter felt "selling the family car" made a better story; perhaps she wrote the truth and an editor misunderstood and shortened it, I don't know; I'd given my usual spiel on car sharing to her tape recorder, so the information was there.
You might consider giving some attention to car sharing; both the service itself and the members who subscribe to it are doing much to make the city better for cycling.
Thanks for putting out such a great magazine,
AJ Andrien