We’ve had a lot of success in using ebikes for transporting
our kids, despite living in challenging circumstances for this: steep country
and relatively long distances. Our little fleet of electric bikes has enabled
us to avoid a second car (almost unique amongst our parenting peers) and kept
our family economy out of trouble during some years of high costs and low
income. They’ve also helped build our children’s sense of self-worth and
independence.
Parents in affluent countries spend a lot of time and a lot
of the family budget on transporting their children around in cars. As well as
cooking the planet, “taxi-parenting” has a high financial cost: running a
second car costs are in the $5000 to $20,000 per year range, without taking into account
the health costs, car storage and parking costs, or the unproductive time
spent. I think that there is an even greater cost: undermining our childrens’
capability and engagement in the world. Transport has become a totally passive
exercise, with even older teenagers being pushed in 2 ton prams to school each
day. We are telling our children that they are incapable of getting themselves
where they want or need to go, and disengaging them from the world – how many
or our children are also staring at screens while being driven around?
Of course there are risks to children travelling by bike.
However the health risks to children of taxi parenting are enormous: look at
the declining health of children in affluent countries. Consider also the cost to their
spirit and sense of themselves.
Babies and toddlers on bikes
Small children are probably the easiest to transport by bike. Heaps
of baby seats are available for attachment to normal transport bikes, as well
as trailers. I carried our youngest around in a rear baby seat for a few years,
until he was too heavy for me to keep the front wheel on the ground when I was
pushing the bike up hill. At this size it was difficult to transport our kids far by bike, until we got the Xtracycle.
Small kids on bikes
Our first electric Xtracycle cargo bike was a total game
changer for child transport. Starting when he was 6 years old, Luka travelled 1000s of km on
the back of my Xtracycle and had a hoot. Transporting Luka also kept me fit and
sane while Erika went back to full-time study.
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| Getting wet isn't so bad |
Luka was around 25kg for most of his time on the back of the
Xtracycle. We burnt out one Bafang SWXH hub motor on the slow, steep climbs,
before installing a Bafang BPM (which has done 8000km without trouble since
then). I attached footrests for
Luka, which are important for mounting and dismounting, and give
stability while riding. I had intentions to fit rear handlebars, but Luka was fine
holding onto either my belt (warming his fingers on cold days) or my seatpost.
Once Luka passed 30kg, he got harder to haul. He also was
getting old enough to ride his own ebike, so I made him one. Interestingly, my
google searches for info on kids’ electric bikes yielded nothing.
Luka’s first bike was small: 20” wheels and ??cm seat tube.
It had a Shimano 3-speed hub with roller brake in the back and a Bafang SWXK
front motor with V brakes (brake studs TIG welded on by friend Ian Aitchison).
I designed this bike to be easy to use: Luka wasn’t an
experienced rider. It’s been hard to teach our kids to ride, living on the
mountain, as there are very few flat places they can safely ride. Thus this
bike was the first bike Luka did a lot of riding on at home.
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| Luka and his friend Rudy lacing the 3-speed wheel |
As the bike was something of an experiment, I made a quick and easy battery box from papier mache. I glued (using
Bondcrete PVA) a box from corrugated cardboard (from normal fruit boxes), then
layered on scrap paper with diluted PVA. Once it had dried thoroughly in the
sun, I gave it a couple of coats of enamel paint to make it somewhat water
resistant. I used a heavy plastic bag as a waterproof lid. This box withstood
many crashes!
To carry the battery box I had to make a custom rear rack. I
used pieces of cardboard to mock up the shape of the rack and get accurate
dimensions. The rack was fabricated from 6mm/1/4” mild steel round bar – I get
it as straight drawn wire, which has a good finish (compared to reinforcing
steel). This is easy to weld (with stick welding), strong and easily repaired,
even if it is a bit heavy. After fabrication, I paint these racks with standard
steel primer and enamel.
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| Rear rack welded and painted |
Using a front motor ended up being a real problem – which
was a surprise to me as I have ridden 16,000km on my front motor, 20” folding
bike. With a light rider and a front motor, there isn’t enough weight on the
front wheel to achieve adequate traction going uphill, when the road is wet or
loose. When the road was wet, Luka’s front wheel would be skidding for
kilometres on long steep climbs, making steering difficult. Getting started on
our long dirt access road was very difficult: throttling would tend to cause a
front wheel spin, making the bike unstable when trying to mount.
Despite the front wheel skidding trouble, Luka travelled
100s of km on this bike, riding behind me, to play dates and wherever we needed
to go locally. As Luka was growing quickly at the time, I changed handlebars to
riser bars after a few months. However eventually Luka decided the front wheel
skidding problem was no good, and we made him another bike with a rear motor.
Luka’s current bike (2016) is a folding bike salvaged from
the tip, with 20” wheels, 6-speed derailleur gears and V-brakes. To avoid the
trouble of making a battery box I bought a bottle battery with 18650 cells from
Greenbikekit.com. The folding bike had a strong rear rack, so the whole
assembly was quite quick and easy.
The rear motor works very well: no skidding, so no trouble
on wet roads and Luka can even ride up our steep access road – making trips out
significantly quicker.
As with all our ebikes, Luka’s bike has mounts for front and
rear lights, and carries panniers. As it is a folding bike scaled for a
smallish adult, it will fit him though a fair bit of growth. Like all/most
folding bikes, the short wheel base puts most of the rider’s weight on the rear
wheel, which gives some riders a sense that it is at risk of unplanned
wheelies. I may build it a front pannier rack (like I use on my folding bike)
to help balance this.
Although the bike is a cheap, steel folding bike, it seems
to be quite robust, especially compared with much more expensive Dahons. Hinges
and locks for the folding mechanism are simple, robust and look like they would
be easy to repair – we’ve had a lot of trouble with these parts of Dahons.
Being steel makes it easy to repair or modify, e.g. we could braze or TIG on
disc brake mounts if it goes into frequent use by someone heavier (the long
steep descents around here wear away rims using V-brakes, and risk tyre
blowouts from overheated rims).
Teenagers and bikes
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| Jasper on his way to school. Steel-framed Dahon with 20" wheels, rear Bafang SWXH hub motor, Headway 36V battery |
Our oldest, Jasper, has been a frequent ebiker since
highschool. In his last highschool year he rode to and from school nearly every
day, 17km and over 800m gross altitude of steep slopes each way. This was a success
from a range of aspects. For starters we were able to get Jasper to school each
day, without buying a second car, and without spending hours each day driving
him in it – this would have cost more than the school fees. Cycling helped
Jasper develop skills and self-esteem: we were all proud of his daily
achievement, reinforced by many statements of admiration by friends and
neighbours at his riding up a mountain every day. The big challenges included
remembering to recharge his battery every day at school. Samford Steiner School
staff understood what we were doing and were very supportive. While at school Jasper used a folding bike, which gave him more options to get lifts with his bike in family or neighbour's cars - especially on the big climb.
The parent role
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| If Mum rides, the daughter will ride |
Getting our kids on bikes is clearly a social process, more
than a technical one. As with every element of parenting, it starts with
modelling. If you want your kids to cycle for transport, they need to see you
cycling. We need to ride with them, a lot, to develop their skills and
confidence. We’ve made a bit of a fuss about presenting our kids with
particular cycling clothes, panniers and bikes, to give them ownership. I’ve
also made a commitment to cycling with them whenever the younger ones want to
go somewhere, if I think it’s the safest thing or when they want the sense of
support. Being ready and willing to ride them somewhere when they want provides
balance to my lack of willingness to drive them around. This seems like a big
time commitment, but pays back in multiple ways. Riding with your kids can be
one of the great pleasures of family life, especially the stops along the way.
Of course teenagers are likely to do what they are programmed to do and
criticise, express embarrassment, and seek the chauffeur treatment received by
their peers. I’ve learnt to stick to the plan, and remember that the joke of
history is on them: kids grow up to be like their parents.
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| A bunch of young folk on their way to a party off the mountain |
Breaking the paradigm
In many communities our patterns of travel have been
profoundly shaped by the car, requiring children to be driven around by their
parents several times per day just to participate: in school, friendships,
extra activities, etc.. This car-dependent and parent-dependent culture, plus
the digital screen age, are creating an extraordinarily disengaged and
de-skilled generation of children. This is a real challenge for parents who
want to take steps away from high car dependency, build a less environmentally harmful
and more resilient pattern of life and raise more capable kids who will be able
to cheerfully adapt to a less affluent future. Taxi-parenting is a hard pattern
to get out of: not only is it reinforced by the infrastructure we live in, but
the paradigms of our peers accept this as normal.
Bikes and ebikes offer a strategy to disentangle from the
car culture, while maintaining engagement with our spread-out communities. If
your distances are big (but not too big) and you have access to safe-enough
roads, electric bikes can help families travel through their weekly routine,
when walking or push-biking might have been too slow or difficult. They make
cycling achievable when you have to carry loads or when you are not feeling
athletic. Ebikes extend your capability and help maintain transport, without a
car, in communities which have been shaped by cars.
