Bicycle Canopy Research

I’ve been doing a little research on bicycle canopies. There are surprisingly few examples out there. Here are a few that come up on the top of a web search.
(Update: check out my own canopy design and instructions for making it.)

The Environmentalist

Top of the list is the Bicycle Canopy Company. The name sounds promising but the product does not look much better than my prototype. Owner Jill Nerkowski writes “I joined my landscaping and gardening experience with  bicycle mechanics and came up with my idea for a traveling greenhouse…This bicycle canopy can be constructed in your home, with ordinary household tools and easy to purchase materials.” You have to give her credit for her massive amounts of hutzpah. She looks like a lovable kook but hey, there but for the grace of God go I .
http://jillnerkowski.weebly.com
http://jillnerkowski.wordpress.com/about/

The Seeker

Farther down the list is someone who back in 2005 announced his search for any sort of bicycle canopy. He concluded that most of the work being done so far to create a weatherproof bike has been the creation of velomobiles: short bullet-shaped bicycles with a hard enclosure. Velomobiles don’t seem to be good car-replacement vehicles. The tend to emphasize speed, they are expensive and they weigh a lot. I can’t imagine them carrying cargo or a passenger.
http://greenash.net.au/posts/thoughts/in-search-of-an-all-weather-bike

The Bent

I came across this guy Joe Kochanowski who has made over 50 recumbent (a.k.a bent) bicycles over the last twenty years, some of them enclosed like a velomobile. He writes “I am not married so I can do things like overhaul a car engine in my living room without anyone complaining.” I admit to a bit of envy. Go Joe.
http://www.outsideconnection.com/gallant/hpv/joe/

The European

As usual the Europeans are way ahead of us in bicycle technology. The French have brought to market what appears to be the only commercially successful bike canopy I’ve seen.
http://www.veltop.eu/index.php?en

Here’s a cute review by a young citizen:
http://velocoque.free.fr/spip.php?article27

Conclusion

I’m concluding that the bike canopy field is wide open. My design has many elements that I haven’t seen elsewhere: integration with the open-source Xtracycle standard; cold-weather insulation; use on an electric cargo bike; and the highly flexible conestoga design. What I’ve seen is canopies designed for either speed or light rain protection. I haven’t seen any designs that are a serious approach to car-replacement.

For some reason I haven’t seen any Xtracycle canopies. You’d think this would be a popular idea in rainy Portland Oregon which is a nexus of the bike movement. I think the Xtracycle is uniquely suitable for a canopy because both the driver and passenger are on the same bike. This allows one large canopy. The main protection needs to be for the passenger and cargo (perhaps using aerogel insulation which is extremely efficient, thin, and lightweight and may someday be available transparent). The driver, who will be hot from exertion, just needs to be protected from rain and wind. (In my experience I get quite hot biking even in the coldest weather. Maybe a very well insulated canopy could allow the driver’s excess body to warm the passenger.) I think a design that emphasizes covering a passenger will also be easier for the general public to accept. People have already seen plenty of bike trailers with such coverings. With an Xtracycle, it’s a small step to extend the passenger covering to the driver.

Another design opportunity is that the Xtracycle allows you to connect a canopy much farther forward and back than other bikes. The forward connection can even be to the sides of the pedals without interfering with the pedals. If you’ve ever carried lumber on an Xtracycle equipped with the Long Loader accessory you know what I mean.

Another design opportunity: the canopy provides a place to put your flexible thin-film solar panels.

Another design opportunity: the power of an electric bike makes it possible to have a heavier perhaps wooden “wagon” that you can just chuck stuff into or even lock it up. I can imagine a pick-up truck like bicycle. Maybe the bottom of the wagon should be curved like a Conestoga wagon so the cargo doesn’t fly out. Then you just attach a canopy when necessary.

I commend the brave souls noted in this post for the work they’ve done to advance the cause of making bicycles practical for year-round use. I am perplexed that this cause has been completely abandoned by industry, government, and yes, even bicycle manufacturers.

Passenger Canopy Protoype

I conceived of and constructed this canopy in less than an hour. The design was inspired by conestoga wagons. The canopy consists of two hoops made out of 10-foot-long metal tubing that I duct-taped to the corners of my Xtracycle cargo van extension. I then duct-taped two cross-braces to the hoops and covered the whole thing with Tyvek house wrap.

Thea and I took it for a test drive this afternoon. It was surprisingly successful for a working prototype. The biggest flaw was that the Tyvek was incredibly noisy. We figured we should use nylon fabric such as the fabric a tent fly uses instead. And it would be great if the passenger could zip up the enclosure front and back. Also it would be nice if the hoops spread out more to the front and back like a conestoga wagon, but with some adjustment possible so as not to hit the driver. Would it be possible to make a third hoop that partially covered the driver?

I can imagine finding the time to sew a canopy like this. I would also want to replace the metal hoops with fiberglass tent poles and replace the duct tape with cross-ways clamps.

Their Carrying Capacity

Here’s some photos of people in Cambodia carrying things on motorcycles. My carrying capacity pales in the comparison. See more photos at http://www.parish-without-borders.net/cditt/cambodia/dailylife/2007/dailylife07.htm.

My Carrying Capacity

Here are some of the things I’ve carried over the past six months or so.

That’s a cool bike but is it practical?

What do people think when they see me biking around town? When they see me on my electric cargo bike, pannies full of groceries and Thea riding on top? I imagine they are thinking “That’s a cool bike but is it practical?” This is the very question I’m trying to answer with “my experiments with transportation” (which is my new tag line by the way—how do you like it?) So what makes a vehicle practical? Safety, cost, comfort, carrying capacity, and range come to mind. My preliminary results are in: an electric cargo bike is much more practical than people think in a number of ways:

• People tend to overestimate how dangerous biking is. Over time you develop safer and safer routes to your destinations. You learn how to avoid dangerous intersections and you discover scenic back routes. So get over your fears and get on your bike—studies show that the more bikes there are on the road, the safer the roads become for everyone.
• People tend to think biking isn’t practical for the very old or even the very female. The elderly are actually leading the way in the use of electric vehicles. There are whole retirement communities exclusively for the use of under-20mph electric vehicles. And the cultural bias against women biking is an American phenomena: in Europe the percentage of women biking matches men.
• People underestimate how much a bike can carry. I remember the moment in my undergraduate physics class when my professor told us that a frictionless cart rolling on a level road uses no energy, no matter how much weight it’s carrying. This is almost true of a bike. The only limit is the strength of the bike frame. There have been improvements in chromoly steel such that my forty-pound bike can easily carry over 400 pounds. (For some extreme examples of carrying capacity see these photos of Cambodians carrying an outrageous amount of stuff on their motorcycles.) “What about hills?” you say. Read on.
• People overestimate how hard it is to bike up hills and how sweaty they will be when they get to work. This is a big issue for many people, but they probably haven’t heard the good news about two key developments in the past decade. Now that we have relatively light-weight brushless electric motors and lightweight but powerful LiFePo batteries, people no longer have the “sweaty” excuse. An electric motor assisted bike lets you get as sweaty or remain as dry as you want to be.
• People underestimate how far a bike can go. Again an electric motor makes it possible to run several 10-mile errands in a day. You’ve probably heard statistics like this: “Americans use their cars for two-thirds of all trips that are less than 1 mile.” Is that practical? Is it practical to hammer a nail with a sledge hammer?
• People tend to underestimate how fast it is to run errands with a bike. Of course a bike can’t go as fast as a car on the highway. But in stop-and-go city driving I find I am not too far behind my compatriots in cars. And motorists neglect to factor in how much time they spend waiting in traffic, parking and walking from the parking lot.
• However, people are currently realistic that rain and snow and cold can make biking very uncomfortable. I am confident we can develop a technological fix for this problem.

In this analysis we have to ask the converse question: how practical is the auto-centric transportation system that we have?

• How practical is a vehicle that costs 50% of the average family’s income (and goes fast enough to be totaled by a wayward deer?)
• How practical is a vehicle that is so dangerous an average of 114 people die each day in car crashes in the U.S.?  It’s appalling to me that otherwise good people think nothing of stepping into a vehicle that has such possibility of killing or injuring someone else.
• How practical is a transportation system that limits our bodies’ mobility so much that it leads to unprecedented obesity?
• I won’t even get into the bigger question of “Is a transportation system practical if it destroys the planet it’s on?”

It perplexes me that bikes with both an electric motor and cargo capacity are not on people’s radar yet. There was a great piece on NPR about cargo bikes. And there was recently an informative article in the New York times about electric bikes. But the mainstream hasn’t seemed to put those two together. Even the cargo bike people and the electric bike people do not seem to have met each other yet (with the Clever Cycles Stoke Monkey being the exception). I am looking forward to an explosion of interest when people discover how practical electric cargo bikes are.

Taking the Back Way by Bike

One thing I love about biking is that you don’t have to go where the road goes: you can take off in directions that are closed to cars. Down the alley, through the woods, across the fields, around the back. If there is a chain across the road, no problem. If the road is washed out, no problem. You are good to go if you’re on a bike. In fact, often these back ways provide a safer way to get from one place to another than the front way.

I had to bike a couple of errands today and I discovered a couple of neat spots. One was behind a shopping plaza when I was cutting a corner to get home. I found I was able to get from one shopping plaza to another by going across a muddy wooded stretch. It was another world back there, an exquisitely depressing world full of trash and decay and cigarette butts and weird discarded machinery. And yet it was a world more real in a way than the clean commercialized world created by the stores at the front of the shopping center.

I found another cool spot in Cayuga Heights, the fancy neighborhood in Ithaca. I’ve been meeting some friends there on Saturdays to go running, and I noticed on the map that there were two streets that almost connected but did not. Almost-connected streets on a map almost always indicates a cool place accessible only to pedestrians and bicyclists. I went to investigate. I tentatively headed down a parking lot. Sure enough the pavement stopped but an alluring path continued. I started down the path and I suddenly looked up: all the trees along the path were lined up for a hundred yards! It was magical! I have come across several other tree-lined spots like this in Ithaca, relics from a time when people grew tree-lined drives to their mansions. To accommodate the age of the automobile people had to widen their driveways. They were forced to either cut down their trees or make an alternate driveway. The few driveways I’ve seen must have survived because an alternate was possible.

This little tree-lined discovery did not disappoint. I am definitely adding this place to my route when I go to meet my friends on subsequent Saturdays. This is a good example of how I gradually develop a commute over time: I try different ways, see which ones connect, see which ones are pleasant, and over time I can get to most places by bike paths, back roads, back alleys and scenic drives. So can you. Happy trails!