This afternoon, I picked up the trail-a-bike from the shop-- it now sports a cool rear rack, on which I'm going to try to fit my 15 year-old panniers, so the kids can still take their lunches to school-- and hooked it up to the tandem. I then rounded up the kids, and we went for a two-mile ride.
My son is on the left, my daughter's in the middle, and I'm on the right.
Basically, this thing is the size of a truck (at one point I was reminded of the opening scene in Star Wars, with the Imperial battle cruiser that FILLED the screen as it pursued Princess Leia's craft), and it handles like one too. A truck you have to push. The kids are more enthusiastic than useful contributors to the energy system of the bike. But they do a good job of staying on.
It makes my regular mountain bike seem positively diminutive.
It's curious that there's not a bigger, more varied market in bike designs. Essentially, if you want to commute with your kids, and aren't in a place where they can ride safely on their own bikes, your options are very limited: while I'm enthusiastic about the tandem/trail-a-bike combination, it is big, and not very generous in the storage department. Why aren't there, say, more sidecars for bicycles? So far as I can tell, there's only on Canadian company that makes one for children that's available in the U.S. Or other kinds of multiperson bikes?
Maybe it's just an indicator of how unimportant bicycles are to the everyday life of most Americans. In other parts of the world, of course, bike designs are far more varied: people use them like trucks, have virtual stores attached to them, or commute to work in large numbers. Denmark, a nation roughly the size of San Jose, has a huge number of high-quality commuter bike manufacturers, because huge numbers of people have city commutes, and cars are insanely expensive. Maybe we'll catch up. In the meantime, I've got my own ride.
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