Carrying Children the Dutch Way
Here are some shots of the Dutch GMG child seats set up on our jorg&olif Omafiets. There is a very personable Dutch eBay seller named Piet who sells these and other Dutch bike items you are unlikely to find at your local bike shop.
I've set up this bike as a light rail/bus friendly way to carry kids. Say you want to take public transit out to the zoo, have a picnic in the park and then return home via bike - you can't really do it with a trailer, Bakfiets or Xtracycle... I haven't had a chance to field test with 2 kids yet, but I think the front seat is going to be a fantastic way to carry smaller passengers. There's something comforting about having smaller children in front of you so you can keep an eye on them - as cool as bike trailers are, I always felt uneasy with a 1 year old trailing way back there where I couldn't keep close tabs on how he was doing. Note the comfy little nap cushion the Dutch call a "slaap rol" for when kids fall asleep mid-ride. There is also a small clip-on windscreen available for colder days to keep the wind off. A rear child seat makes a really good case for using a bike with a step-through (women's) frame since it wouldn't be as easy to swing your leg over a men's frame.
I'll do a full review of these seats soon with some shots of how easy it is to take them on and off. Initial impression is that the overall build quality and ease of mounting is excellent, particularly for the handlebar mounted seat. Much nicer than anything I've seen at REI or local shops. Anybody else out there using these or Bobike seats for carrying children?
posted by Richard at 9:07 AM
1 Comments:
richard, we've used both front and rear bobike seats with our son on xtracycles:
http://todd.cleverchimp.com/bike/cp/scale.html
http://todd.cleverchimp.com/blog/?p=67
xtracycle sells the bobike rear as the "peapod"
if you don't need to carry 2 kids, and your journey's under 10 miles or so, the brompton/itchair combo is my current fave; http://todd.cleverchimp.com/blog/index.php?s=itchair
taking son to preschool these days involves no seat at all: he stands on the brompton top tube! it's only a few minute ride, slow... but boy do we get dirty looks from the bike fear crowd.
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