Bike-watching in Colombia
Some people like to bird-watch. They carry lists around and every time they see a bird they’ve never seen before, they add it to their “life list.”
Well I do that with cargo bikes. Is it so wrong?
I was checking out this guy’s cargo bike while eating one of the empanadas he was selling (hard-boiled egg and some kind of meat, $0.90) and drinking some of his horchata-like drink when a pack of bona-fide Colombian bike cops rode by.
Here’s a better picture of the cargo bike:
You can see it is basically the same design as the Mercurios we see in Mexico and Tucson, and probably suffers the same handling problems since the steerer is behind the axles of the wheels.
But last night I saw this (all these photos are from Cartagena):
Ed Foster of La Suprema Cycles in Tucson actually has about half a carcass of one of these at his shop; he told me he thinks it came from Argentina. Maybe these are a South American product? You can see that they steer from the center of the front cargo area, in line with the wheel axles, so presumably they do not share the instability problems of the Mercurio design.
Of course, given my Dutch-bike fetish, I quickly sniffed out what are probably the only Dutch bikes in the country, parked outside a hotel in the old-town of Cartagena. I’d sure like to ride around on one, but I think they are only for the patrons of the hotel, and it looks like a pretty expensive place to stay.
Maybe one of my sharp-eyed readers knows what kind of bikes those are with the odd top tubes?
Overall, there seem to be fewer vendors on bikes than in Mexico, but more people riding bikes just to get around. Even at our hotel in Cartagena I notice a couple bikes stashed in a corner that presumably belong to workers here who use them to commute.
Here’s a picture of a family I saw taking a break from a holiday bike ride along the Cartagena walls.
–Erik Ryberg
November 2nd, 2009 at 12:14 pm
The bikes with the funny top tubes a Van Moofs. You can just barely make out a logo in the picture. And they are dutch bikes too!
http://www.vanmoof.com/index.php
November 2nd, 2009 at 1:01 pm
The odd top tubes are actually integrated lights.
November 2nd, 2009 at 2:58 pm
That third picture down: Yeah yeah yeah cargo bike bla bla bla. But LOOK! It appears to be a bike-mounted beer vendor!
November 2nd, 2009 at 4:08 pm
Didn’t BSNYC make fun of the Van Moof in one of his posts?
November 3rd, 2009 at 12:27 am
thats how anyone knows about it lar