Recently Brendan pointed me to
xtracycle, describing a kit to convert a bike to transport more than just its rider. In most countries cycling started as fun but a bike can be practical as well. What struck me most was the name: Sports Utility Bike. SUV pops in minds immediately. I don’t know about you, but I’m not very fond of these tractors, as we call them. I can imagine they can be handy in rural US, where many a road is not that good. But over here in the Netherlands almost every unpaved road is shut for motorized traffic. Still we have a lot of them. But having one instead of an ordinary car is just show.
Bikes have started long ago as a common means of transport in the Netherlands, riding bikes for fun became a common pasture much later. Bicycles used to do a lot of more transportation, instead of a van the grocer/baker/butcher/street sweeper used a bike to transport his goods. A lot of models were available, the best ones were bakfietsen, tricycles which can carry hundreds of kilo’s. There is a complete site dedicated to transport bikes
transportfiets.net They have a special category on
bakfietsen. The text is in Dutch but the (large amount of) images are gorgeous.
These days the mailman still comes on a bike. And there is a big revival of bakfietsen, check
bakfiets.nl to see some beauties of modern engineering.