Another winter

So another winter is starting is Oslo, in Lommedalen its a moonscape of tracks frozen into ice, sprinkled with gravel.  Really rough stuff.  On the roads, conditions range from bare pavement to black ice to thick rough ice.  The Nihola remains a good tool for hauling kids to and from birthdays, school and daycare.  I haven't put on any winter tires yet, but the tires are a bit soft and do the job well.

Oslo seems to have a growing cargo bike movement. But Norwegians as a rule are very serious about being hardcore, transforming stretchpants into every day attire, and when it comes to cargo bikes, they prefer two wheels. I assume to be sporty. I did see one of those turn-tilting trikes (Butchers & Bicycles) around. I don't understand it myself, but I presume because corning fast is very important. Nice bikes I'm sure, I'd buy a Bullitt myself except before that I'd get some other bikes. Priorities...

I think all the cargo cycles I've seen are electrified, sensible on hills of course, and important if you are to achieve high cornering speeds up hill.  However all the electric two-wheelers are vulnerable when traction fails, even for a short distance.  Trikes, including those with electric motors, suffer a much smaller penalty when they come into a situation where the drive wheel spins.  Its also pretty harmless to corner at a speed where the steering tires slide.  Icy ridges are amusing, not scary.  I think people in Oslo under-valuing this.  (Edit in spring: cargo bikes were invisible all winter.)

So I can screw around on icy ridges and steep hills with no winter tires.  I can use 100% of the available traction, no need for a safety margin (except for braking distance).  The winter tire (the back tire) can wait for winter to really arrive, and I can still get all the way to the center of Oslo safely.  Those two 20" winter front tires probably will go unused for the 3rd Oslo winter.  Long live the trikes.

(There is still the trouble that Niholas have poor front brakes, so I can't really say they are a obvious choice in Oslo.)

Nasty slush

Oslo just hasn't been a proper winter city this year.  After three weeks frozen, its been going back and forth between snow and rain.  Quite a mess on the way to the daycare, but the conditions were nearly perfect during the commute from the daycare to work.  On most days I chose to use the Nihola with less-impressive gearing and the Schwalbe Snow Stud, to benefit the commute part of the daily journey.

Harmless looking, but difficult.  That rut took some effort, but the hill was climbed.
Slope less than 10%, one kid, perhaps 6kg on the rear.

This was especially nasty, hard to drive on even when level, and it packed into the tread.
Spinning solved nothing here.  Having two kids in the box didn't make it easier.

It turns out that really dense snow, stuff which is transitioning into slush and ice via rain, is really a challenge on a hill.  It drags on the tires, and digging might never reach down to anything better.  It seems that bikes have an advantage here due to better weight distribution and more tire per unit of mass.

Parking lot slush.  I should have taken a picture of the ice that followed.

On level ground, slushy snowy crap can be much deeper and rutted without causing too much trouble.  But remember to rock the trike to "push" past the worst parts.

Looks like snow on top, but it transitions to dense slush.

It doesn't take a lot of dense snow underlain by slush and ice to cause a problem on a climb.  The stuff I encountered was really heavy, so just getting the tires through it was a challenge, but if the rear tire dug much it would just come to some sort of dense semi-slush ice.  On level ground it went well enough.

My son eagerly does a bit of cleanup.  This gate is kind of irritating in difficult conditions.
Slope is as much as 15% through here.

Picking up my son after a daytime snow flurry.  Clean snow isn't a problem.

This period has nicely illustrated to me that I am dependent on someone to do at least a halfassed job of snowplowing on the steeper sections of the climb to my son's daycare.

The right winter tire

So we have two Niholas.  They've got different gear hubs and winter tires on them, and I swap back and forth as appropriate.  (We basically only take out both trikes at the same time in the summer.)  Since I can jump back and forth, I've got rather more insight into winter tires on Niholas than most.  Allow me to share.

The fancy trike has a Nokian/Suomi Extreme 294 (26x2.1), and the basic one has a Schwalbe Snow Stud (26x1.9).  While both are studded winter tires, the tires are in different categories.  Which is to say, they can be compared, but the differences outweigh the similarities.  The Extreme has way more studs and has more aggressive tread, which pays off on climbs, and on pavement it sounds like a wheel covered in velcro (especially at low pressures).  The Snow Stud is mild mannered on pavement, making hardly any noise of note, wasting less energy, and doubtless lasting longer, while also being a lot cheaper.  Of course it doesn't climb as well.

And to be clear, the Nokian/Suomi Extreme does climb.  It digs and it scratches; pure ice can possibly be climbed up to a 15% slope with something like 20kg in front 10kg in back, and low pressure.  Softer stuff can be climbed beyond that, however this can require patience, low gearing, and stamina.  The Snow Stud gives and spins up much sooner in almost any snowy, slushy or icy surface.  The worst surface I have experienced for the Snow Stud is one that is icy and slightly lumpy, it just completely defeats the tire.

So here is the difficult part about transporting children as part of a cycle commute in an Oslo winter: each tire is sub-optimal, one could say annoying, when its out of its element.  I haul a kid up a fairly steep and marginally-maintained hill on my way to work, and I also go the rest of the way into the office with less load, on better paths, on the same Nihola.  The tire that can conquer the hill (the Extreme) proceeds to sap my energy and destroy itself on km's of pavement.  The tire (Snow Stud) that is pleasant on the pavement can be difficult to scale the slopes with, in many conditions.  Happily, rear tire inflation can be adjusted to significantly widen the range of situations a given tire can perform acceptably.  Airing up and down is kind of annoying, but its a lot less work than cycling km's with an inefficient tire.  (So: want traction?  Air down.)

For a more normal Nihola usage scenario, which would be a relatively short tour of schools, stores and public transportation, either tire would vastly outperform a standard slick summer tire (in snow or on ice).  Also, with some basic steps like airing down and carrying some kilos on the rear rack, even the Snow Stud will likely provide more traction that the standard gearing of a Nihola can require.  (With the exception of smooth ice.)

A few more nuggets.  Its pretty easy to lock up the rear tire of a Nihola while going down hill on ice.  If not addressed, this can easily lead to the trike not pointing in the same direction it is moving, which is not necessarily cause for alarm, but should probably be corrected.  A rear tire with more studs will make sliding harder and recovery easier.  (I would advise using front and rear brakes on icy hills.)

I have purchased a pair of studded front tires (20x1.6 Schwalbe Marathon Winter), but not installed them.  The regular Schwalbe Marathon Plus tires work pretty well on some pretty slippery stuff, and unlike on a bike, sliding the front tires is not necessarily cause for alarm.  Studs would probably help, but also that adds rolling resistance and noise.  I have decided that the conditions are not currently bad enough to bother swapping the tires.

I would like to try a Schwalbe 26x2.0 Marathon Winter in back.  Looks like a great choice for ice, or even pavement, but its harder to say if it can dig well enough in snow.  One of the problems I've had with the Snow Stud is that it won't dig sufficiently in some types of dense slushy snow.  Sheets of ice may or may not be a primary concern, and the Snow Stud is priced fairly low, so it could be that the humble Snow Stud remains the best trike tire for reasonably flat places with reasonably mild winters.

Update a month later:

Still running the Snow Stud, and its pretty harmless on pavement.  Really not a bad tire for insecure weather.

A Schwalbe Snow Stud is happy even with no snow in sight.

The Nihola vs The Snowy Hill

My son is always ready with the snow shovel.

After a snowless holiday season, Oslo finally reached freezing and stayed there between the 11th of January and the 2nd of February, which was three full working weeks.  Strangely enough, snow fell almost every day, ranging from dust to 10cm/4in.

About when this was all starting, I actually went out with a 60cm/2ft level and tape measure, and made a few measurements of the slope that I need to haul my son up, to reach his daycare.  Of course I didn't want to spend too much time looking ridiculous measuring the public path, so I only measured the most interesting spots.  To jump to the numbers, I can now say that I have definitely climbed slopes over 25% with two kids in the box (lets say 50kg of cargo total) on my 15 gear-inch Nihola.  I can also confidently say that a 15% slope is doable with the same load on my 21 gear-inch Nihola (with a Shimano Nexus 8 hub, nothing exotic).  So thats good to keep in mind.  Niholas can do hills.

The more interesting question to a year-round utility cyclist might be how steep of a slope can be managed when its covered in snow.  I've been testing this the past three weeks, but first a little about the hills I've been climbing.  On the way to the daycare, there is in fact a small bit of 25% slope, rising suddenly after a tunnel under a road.  This flattens to nothing in 40m or so, but its a definite problem spot.  After some modest climbing, a 200m stretch that is up to 10% slope starts, then a stretch of 70m at 12% slope, with a measured max of 15%.  Overall > 50m in < 600m with an average slope of 8-9%.  On the opposite side of that hill, without children, I climb/descend 175m in 3km with slopes up to around 15%, and once in this period I also took a long way home, which ended up being un-plowed for 2km averaging 3% slope.  Now none of this is epic on the scale of hills where snow accumulates, but its plenty hard enough, and since I don't see a lot of people doing it, I might as well share what I have observed.  Perhaps people think its harder than it is.

First observation: I can pedal my Nihola some places and conditions where mountain bikes carrying no particular cargo can't be ridden.  I shouldn't be too proud of myself; sometimes it might be faster to just pick up a bike and walk, than grind through the snow on a trike.  But anyway, if a person is intent on bringing their trike with them, it can be done, and it doesn't involve falling over.

This unstable snow caused a lot of trouble for bikers.
The dark mark is where someone had to fight to remain upright.

Second observation: Light fluffy snow on relatively flat ground is not a problem, given appropriate preparation of the Nihola (rear tire type and inflation, weight in back).  If the snow gets deep enough so that the steering linkages or cargo box start dragging, then forward progress becomes markedly more difficult (depending on how heavy the snow is).  The box bottom is about 15cm/6in off the ground, the lowest steering components are around 11cm/4in, and the pedals go down to around 8cm/3in.

This amount of new snow was no particular problem, even with a shifting foundation underneath.

Further observations: A 25% snow-covered slope is in reach if the conditions are right.  For example, on hard-packed snow, when the temperature was -15C/5F, starting from being almost stopped at the bottom, on a Nihola with around 23kg of stuff in front, 10kg of stuff on the rear rack, 21 gear-inches and a Schwable Snow Stud for traction, I could manage.  You could say that the snow conditions were favorable, providing a firm surface for the tire the bite in.  The relatively sparse studs on that tire were likely of little use in these conditions.

The condition of the road surface is of paramount importance.  On the same section the following day, I had a lot of trouble with the other Nihola.  In that case, the snow was fresh (less than an inch), the temperature was more like -5C/25F, I had closer to 37kg in front, 10kg in back, a more impressive Nokia Extreme (26x2.1) rear tire, and 15 gear-inches to work with.  I had to make multiple attempts at the climb, and only succeeded on the less-steep side of the path and with significant tire slippage.  As the days passed, I continued to climb that nasty spot through various forms of snow, and generally higher temperatures, up to icy melting conditions this morning.  In looser snow, this often meant spinning and digging, with very slow progress and sometimes with rolling backwards to use the excavated trench to build a spot of inertia.  This morning with maybe 17kg in front and 6kg in back (I weighed my bag to see), on wet soft ice, I needed a run at it to clear the steepest parts and could make a little progress from a standstill somewhere over (estimated) 15% slope.  I was carting both kids up the hill, and the older one had to walk there.  Three-wheel balance allowed me to thoroughly confirm that there was no way I'd make it with both kids; usually after a run I was sliding backwards with all three wheels locked up.

Here, the rear tire has scraped up snow shavings from a hard-packed surface.

Here we have dug a trench in semi-packed snow.
Heavy load in front, not much on the rack.

With 2-3 inches of unpacked snow on top of packed snow, around -8C/18F, I had to roll backwards a few times on the 20-25% slope.  Its important to be mindful to push rider weight as far backwards as possible.  The 15% slope areas were difficult but steady, lots more pedal turning than actual forward progress.  I set rear tire inflation quite low, which might have helped.  I doubt I could have it without the 15 gear-inches, but rolling the pedals backwards was unnecessary.

I met various forms of snow in these three weeks, from unpacked to hard packed, and with lots of foot-trodden mushy middle ground.  Obviously hard packed is preferable, but when that was not available, I was not able to determine if it was better to drive where people have made a mess, or where the snow was undisturbed.  Lots of slow work in both.

On soft ice, the advantage of 15 gear-inches is reduced compared to something more like 20 gear-inches, because it was necessary to be very careful with the torque, to maintain traction.  On the other hand, having really low gears allows comfortable crawling while waiting for all the kids sliding down the icy hill to get out of the way.  Its best to keep moving, rather than stopping.  Rolling the pedals backwards was possibly essential in really delicate situations, to avoid breaking traction and starting a backwards slide.

I suspect that hauling kids around on hills in the winter is not an activity that is about to go mainstream.

The snow is melting away, and messy.

Niholas off road

A nice thing about bikes is the freedom.  The rider can do whatever they like with it.  For example, taking a cargo cycle off the pavement, maybe even way off the road.  Its a crazy idea.  Imagine taking a minivan into a mud bog: it would get stuck immediately, dirty inside and out, would be expensive to retrieve, and might be damaged by impacts, scrapes, water, even overheating of components.  But on your cargo cycle, there's nothing stopping you except your level of enthusiasm.

Relaxing path.

When the nose hits the mud, you stop.

In the world of cargo cycles according to Ray, only those with front boxes matter, and of those there are just a few kinds that matter.  Of course there is the Nihola, but also the Bullitt occupying the go-fast end of the spectrum and Christiania trikes at the utilitarian end.  Also there is the Dutch angle on this, the WorkCycles Cargobike springs to mind, but its as heavy as a trike without the balance advantage, so it is best left to boring tasks on firm, level ground.  This, according to Ray.

A Nihola is particularly well suited to going on crazy adventures with kids.  This is mostly due to two things: (1) unified frame (2) three wheels.  You can find larger three-wheeled conveyances (Christiania), or faster two wheeled ones (Bullitt or a long-tail), but a Nihola is (IMO) the best platform for hauling your offspring out into the local tamed wilderness in search of righteous mud.

But let me quality that a bit.  A Nihola is unlikely to be much fun where a mountain bike can't be ridden.  The tamed wilderness should have sufficiently firm and smooth ground, moderate to mild hills, mild side-slopes, 90cm+ gaps between trees, and relatively few fallen branches.   Mud, roots and rocks are OK in moderation.  In Denmark, this means just about any mountain bike path I've seen, plus a lot of walking and horse paths, and sometimes the forest floor itself.  So lets get started.

Slopes.

Climbable.

Just how nuts can a person go on their Nihola out in the (tamed) forest with two kids up front?  This will depend in part on some specifications of the Nihola in question: 1) low gearing, 2) grippy rear tire, 3) lowered inflation pressure in rear tire.  Also one should not neglect to put some weight over the rear tire: snacks, water bottles, spare clothes, diapers and so on.  Finally the driver needs to understand: 1) balance, 2) rocking, 3) wheel placement, 4) ground clearance, 5) approach angle.  With these points in mind, with maybe 40kg of children in the box, I have gone through mud that mountain bikes avoid, up hills that mountain bikes struggle to climb, on many km's of winding paths, and gained many hours of happy children time.

So to start with the mechanical side of things, a person needs low gears for the most pleasant Nihola offroading experience.  I can say from experience that 15 gear-inches is a lot better than 21 gear-inches, which is a lot better than 26 gear-inches.  Its also convenient if your gearing solution: 1) doesn't break into bits under heavy loads, 2) lets you roll the pedals backwards freely, 3) lets you change gears while stationary.  (That's because if you start a hill in the wrong gear, you can quickly become stationary.)  Shimano Nexus 8 or Alfine 8 is almost certainly the most sensible choice.

If your ground surface is wet or soft, knobby tires are a really good idea.  Relatively smooth tires, such as a Nihola is delivered with, give up quickly off pavement.  On a hill, one can often work around a lack of traction by rolling a bit backwards downhill in order to attempt a new approach.  In mud, a lack of traction leaves rocking as the only escape short of dismounting and pulling.  Lowered tire pressure in back is a useful traction aid, along with some weight on the cargo rack.  I suspect the Schwalbe Marathon Plus MTB is an excellent choice of tire.  Either the 26x1.9" or 26x2.1" version should fit in the frame, but the fatter one will be a close call.  My own experience with this comes from a 26x2.1 Nokian Extreme 294 (a winter tire), and I have a 26x2.0 Schwalbe Marathon Tour that I intend to try this summer.

This thin wet grass on greasy mud would only need a little slope to stop an unprepared Nihola.  But we are prepared.

So to conclude the mechanical side of things, we can say there isn't a lot to do.  Get the lowest available gearing, a knobby tire, lower the inflation in back, and carry something on the cargo rack for best results.  (The cargo rack also makes a good handle, and should be considered essential by any serious owner.)  Driver technique is more complicated.

First of all, its good to keep the rubber on the road.  Happily, children in the box have a powerful stabilizing effect.  Not so happily, weight on the cargo rack has an opposing effect, though a less significant one.  Also happily, with three wheels, the rider is free to get into positions which are atypical for a cycle of any kind.  For example, I have sometimes pedaled with my behind next to the saddle, not on it.  Balance downhill is pretty easy, although a few times I was afraid of tipping the whole trike over its nose, not just nose-down but entirely upside down, and so I did what I could to sit as far back as possible.  Balance uphill is easy so long as there is no side-slope.  An uphill side-slope renders a Nihola helpless embarrassingly easily, because the rider's weight can easily end up being outside the balance triangle formed by where the tires contact the ground.  So when climbing a steep hill, the rider needs to constantly be aware of the danger of tipping.  As the rider's body moves here and there while turning the pedals, the tipping risk changes.  The possibility of doing all pedaling with only the up-slope foot is one reason that being able to roll pedals backwards is an advantage.

Does that look like a hill?  Zero of four MTB's that we saw biked all the way up it.

Rocking is basically a trike-only trick, and very effective.  Its not so hard.  The rider throws his or her weight forwards and backwards while using the pedals to assist.  This can be an effective way to "hammer" through mud and snow, in addition to being handy at stoplights.  Again, pedals that freewheel backwards are helpful here.

Wheel placement is important for a number of reasons.  I'm not a mountain biker, but I think we can say that riding a Nihola is "technical".  You go slow and pick the places where the wheels will work best.  Things to consider include balancing, finding small climbable parts of the terrain, trying to have only one tire climb any obstacle at a time, avoiding crashing the steering components (under the box) into rocks, keeping the nose clear of the ground, and (depending on the gearing) arranging for the pedals to be in the right places at the right time.

Closely coupled to wheel placement is the issue of ground clearance.  The lowest point of a Nihola is actually a pedal at the bottom of its travel, and these can definitely come into contact with nature.  The steering arms are another possible point of concern, as are the linkages from the steering arms to the plate at the bottom of the steering tube.  Often the most exposed point is that plate, which is located at basically the central point between the wheels, and ripe for high-centering.  The plate seems to be well made, but I have actually bent it on the blue Nihola while navigating down some rocks.  Still works...

There is more.  The approach angle of a Nihola, or in other words the steepness of slope that the nose can clear, is a point of interest.  The nose of a standard Nihola sticks out pretty far (though not as far as the 4 seat model).  Its a common place for me to loose paint, sometimes even in civilization.  In the forest, if the nose hits the mud, its like a ship running aground.  Dismount and pull.  At one point I wanted to get a round-box Nihola, which has no protruding nose, for the purpose of driving in the forest with the kids.  That model is generally intended for older people who have difficultly with balance, so there would be some irony in mountain biking with one.

So, where does all this leave an adventurous Nihola rider?  Its still harder to take the kids onto the mountain bike trail than it is to take just yourself.  With two kids, a person could easily end up pedaling 60kg more than they would solo on two wheels.  You probably don't want to be on a trail with long uphills.  Some trails are easy, some are fun, some are really a pain, you'll know when you try.  Regardless of that, kids will likely have a good time.  Oh, and wear your rubber boots.

Mmm, mud.

A rest for the weary.

Pleasant tour with two kids.

Forward progress in snow

When we were thinking about buying Nihola #1 two years ago in Denmark, we had really basic questions that we never got a good answer for before we tried for ourselves, such as the possibility of cycling up hills.  Turn out hills are harmless, so now we've moved on to snowy, icy hills.  Is that possible?  (I can imagine that the risk of not being able to get up hills in the winter would be a huge barrier to someone who didn't already own two cargo bikes before arriving at the hills in question.)

I have Nihola-ed around in Oslo since last February so I know a bit of the answer already, but unlike then, I now need to get my kid up 70m of steep elevation climb in the morning, descend 175m (in a bit over 3km), pedal 7km farther to work, then repeat going the other way.  Its actually a bit of a question if this is going to work all winter.

It snowed maybe 10-15cm (4-6in) on sunday and monday a week ago.  The first thing I did was to go out there with the summer tires on, and no weight on board.  (We were trying to go get a pizza.)  Turns out a Nihola configured in this way can hardly move on flat fresh-snow-covered ground, but getting a 20kg kid to sit on the cargo rack enables respectable hill climbing.  (Putting weight in the box has no potential to improve forward traction.)

So that brings me to the first lesson of driving a Nihola on ice and snow.  Put weight on the back tire, lots of it.  Everything that you are carrying should go back there, with the possible exception of kids.  I would agree if someone were to declare its pretty stupid to have a big empty box in front, while everything is hanging off the rear rack with bungies, but at least the big empty box keeps the machine from falling over.  (There is actually one kind of trike available in Copenhagen, Sorte Jernhest, which is front wheel drive with rear steering.  So anyone who is really bothered by empty cargo boxes and full cargo racks can go buy one of those and find peace.  Best of luck on the snowy, icy hills.)

The second thing to do is lower the pressure in the rear tire.  How much depends on lots of things, but in a difficult situation it can go really low, just enough to keep the rim off the ground maybe 1cm when loaded.  That is only advisable at low speeds.

The final magic is to fit a tire with helpful tractive properties.  I am under the impression that aggressive tread (knobby) is a good idea on a Nihola because the three-wheel balance enables some digging, and studs are essential if anything is to be accomplished by the tire once it digs through the snow cover.  For climbing on ice, the more studs the better, but studs really aren't going to do much on a hill unless you have first added some weight on the back tire, and set an appropriately low pressure.

Flats, continued

So its great to save the world by riding a bike, but flat tires are a bit of a barrier that it seems cars have more or less gotten past, while bikes have not.

So, we have just been visiting Denmark the past couple weeks, and we got there by using the Oslo to Copenhagen ferry.  The price to take a cycle on board... a cycle of any size.... is negligible after the price of the humans.  So we just load up two cargo trikes and pedal over to the ferry, and the next day we pedal off again in a new land.  Mindful of the risk of flats, I packed two fresh new tubes for those troublesome front tires.

We did maybe 150km a week going around town on a Nihola and a borrowed bike without a problem.  Then on the way back, we got two flats on the same tire within a few kms.  While on the way to the ferry to leave the country.  This was of course a front tire, on the right.  Not usually high pressure, not unusually heavy load, the same Schwalbe Marathon Plus 20" tire that has been there all along.

Small metal object, sharp on one end.

Nice sharp bit of glass.

There was a silver lining on this.  I found that we have a lock that works great for lifting the front tire.  Just set the parking brake and use the lock as a leg, in this case under a front corner of the box.

Using a lock to hold the flat tire off the ground while the repair is made.

Commuting 2

I've been commuting on my bike most days the past two weeks because one of our Niholas is temporarily out of service (more on that later).  This morning while driving my regular commute I noticed that, despite the somewhat low inflation on my 622-37 tires, my bike was trying shake the meat off my arms.  Hmmm, the Niholas don't do that.

On my way home, after having picked up my son, I had the chance to drive over some roots on a little path, using my bike.  I wasn't looking to drive over roots, they just happen to be on the path, and the path is very narrow.  It turns out that I had driven over the same roots this past Friday with the Nihola and actually hadn't really noticed them, but on the bike they were impossible to overlook, very bumpy.

Its interesting to switch back and forth between bike and trike, it brings the differences into focus.  This is a bike with 622-37 tires, not some skinny racing slicks, and not even inflated to a level any performance biker would tolerate, but in many cases it rides rough compared to the Niholas.

My commuting bike, totally out of place in the land of sport commuting that is Oslo.

Wandering off topic...

Interestingly, this bike is a reputable Danish name sticker on some soulless multinational corporate asian-made bike.  It costs half what a Nihola costs, if we don't add options like child seats to the Nihola that the bike clearly doesn't have.  But this isn't actually as favorable to the bike as it might at first seem.  The Nihola is made in Denmark, built to order, you might even meet people who assemble it.  Every part is quality and likely to last.  To contrast, the bike is sold a chain store that shovels crap in bulk.  The spokes on mine started rusting within weeks, the kickstand failed, every last piece of plastic has failed in three years, and the handles have creaked since day one.  They even outfitted it with a poorly-sealed gear hub.  (On the positive side, the tires are great.)  Anyone who didn't want to fix a bike themselves would have thrown it in the trash already.

A Nihola might actually have a lower cost per km as a commuter than a typical name-brand Danish street bike, if you are careful with your options on the Nihola, and maybe a bit unlucky with the bike.

A Morning Tour

I took the two kids on a little Nihola tour before lunch on Sunday.  Two kids, a running bike, a plastic trike, snacks, water, spare clothes, rain clothes for everyone, spare footwear for the kids, a saw, a bucket and my usual heavy bike toolkit.  Its nice not to wonder how everything will be carried, or what it will weigh.

Of course since I'm writing about it, I pondered the weight anyway, which I estimate to be about 45kg of stuff, children included.

So off we went without much of a plan.  I wanted to go over to the next "mini-valley" (Mærradalen) and have a look at a tree we had seen fallen over across a path.  (An excellent opportunity for socially acceptable destruction.)  Getting over there means climbing and descending hills.  Now, some people have said trikes are no good on hills.  That might be true if a person doesn't need to carry anything, and indeed a lot of the bikers in Oslo aren't interested in carrying so much as a fender on their bikes.  But I have children, and we're carrying stuff.  Trikes are awesome on hills.  (Awesome in a slow, steady kind of way.)  We climbed and descended our way over there.

So we went to the tree, cut it apart, and made some little tree swords, which went into the Nihola with everything else.  Off we went to the next destination.  My son spotted a path going off from the main path.  Imagine yourself there on a two-wheeled cargo bike, 45kg of crap in the box, you can either go on the nice wide path, or the smaller one that disappears into the trees, at the bottom of a valley.  So we went on the smaller path.

Starting a little climb into the unknown.

Going back down, with the scout returning to report.

The little path had some rocks on it.  I didn't think it was so bad, but I did pinch-flat a tube in front, as I later discovered after the patch I applied didn't stop the leaking from the second hole.  Thankfully I carry a tire pump.  (Obviously, right?  Why not.)  So the hill got really steep.  My son jumped out and pushed.  We cleared the first hill, descended a hill, and then came to an even steeper hill.  More pushing.  This was getting a bit epic, with stalling, coasting backwards, and a slipping rear tire.  I got small blisters on my hands, such was the force I applied on the handlebar, while trying to force the pedals around.

Then we stopped for a while to pick raspberries and look at big fat brown slugs, before we came to the next hill.  As befitting any respectable story, this hill was even steeper, and my son wanted to go up it with the Nihola.  So we started.  He pushed, I pedalled, and little sister sat in the box.  Maybe 1/3 of the way up little sister had to get out.  We continued.  Maybe 1/2 the way up, I couldn't turn 21 gear-inches on a trike with less than 10kg of stuff in it, and a ~20kg boy pushing.  And to be perfectly clear, not being able to turn the cranks on a trike doesn't mean going slow enough to loose balance.  It means forward movement is impossible.

So I parked it there and took a picture.  My son thought this was all very nice.  We then went back and pushed it up the hill, which was quite some work for us on that slope.  I was worried about slipping and subsequently being run over.  I could see that the vehicles that drove up this hill had been leaving rubber on the exposed rocks.  (We can credit the nearby military installation, I suppose.)

Scaling the big hill.

Finding a place for snack time.

So it was then snack time, and we went back home on a mostly paved path.  That is the story of our little pre-lunch tour.

Flats

Today I flatted while out with the kids.  I think this is the 4th flat I've gotten on a Nihola since moving to Norway.  I got one flat in Denmark.  All 5 of these have been on the front tires.  The Denmark flat was a piece of glass I believe.  In Norway, once it was either rock or glass (can't recall), twice it was bits of sharp rocks, and this time the tube failed on a seam away from the road surface.  I wonder if it was a pinch; I was driving on a rocky path with both kids on board.  But it was on a seam, and I didn't notice any rim impact, very suspicious.

Anyway, fixing a front flat on a Nihola is about as easy as fixing a flat can be, as long as you have something to hold up the front of the trike.  In this case, it was a running bike.

Using a convenient running bike under the nose of the Nihola.

The tube can just be pulled out for most patching.

Don't know why the fronts appear so much more flat-happy than the rear, but now the score is 5-0 with fronts in the lead.  The four times that something came through the tire surface, it was small and sharp, and had probably been digging for hours.  Possibly the tires gather more sharp objects from the less-traveled sides of bike paths, but I am confident that at least 2/5 of the flats had nothing at all to do with pavement, while another 2/5 were definitely on-pavement events.  Also the reduced per-tire weight in front should help puncture resistance.  My best guess is that smaller tires generate higher forces on whatever they roll over, for the same reason that they ride rougher over bumps, thereby increasing the odds of a puncture.

Both Niholas are fitted with Schwalbe Marathon Plus tires.

Bad Pavement

The surfaces upon which a cyclist rides in Oslo are pretty rough.  I don't have a handy roughness-o-meter, but its easy enough to notice a crappy ride, and Oslo delivers.

First some background on bicycle infrastructure in Oslo.  There are hardly any bike paths that go even a few km without major interruption.  Bike paths appear and disappear with regularity.  Sometimes on one side of a road, sometimes on the other.  Sometimes a bike path is a line of paint in the main road.  Sometimes a bus/taxi lane doubles as a bike path, sometimes a trolley track.  Sometimes it appears cyclists are intended to ride on sidewalks.  Very often a bike path dumps onto a crosswalk complete with meaningful curb topography.  Last time, in fact make that just about the only time, that I rode along Ring 2 I just felt depressed.  I witnessed everything except the trolley tracks in maybe 4 km.

Oslo also has, in my estimation, a lot of damage to the road surfaces, especially ones that are less trafficked and therefore less important to fix.  Probably the winter does it.

My daily commute includes a bit of cobblestones, a heavy pedestrian zone, large rock paving blocks, bus lanes, trolley tracks, some smaller curbs and lots of broken-up pavement.  They love using blocks of stone sticking up as much as 1cm (I estimate) from the pavement on bike paths around road crossings.

I usually commute on a Nihola.  The standard puncture-resistant tires in front are 20x1.75 (47-406) Schwalbe Marathon Plus, and the tire in back is a 26x1.75" (47-559) version of the same.  The Nihola is of course a cargo trike, and exactly how it rides has a lot do with what is in the box, as well as the tire pressure.  Empty and with hard-pumped tires, hitting a bump (such as those embedded stone blocks) can make the front hop.  Light cargo (and the kid seat) can bounce around quite a bit.  The resulting noise can be a significant irritant, and the ride isn't great for the driver either.  (Its nice to have some form of padding in the bottom of the box.)

A trike generally suffers more from bad pavement than a bike.  The three tires follow their own paths over the bumps, making it hard to avoid everything.  The two front tires can transfer left and right pitches to the rider, and they can also work as a team to transmit bumps, shakes and shivers when they impact dumps simultaneously or nearly simultaneously.  The Nihola designers also made a particular decision that adversely effects its bump-handling: the front tires are set fairly far back.  This is a trade-off that helps the turning radius, stability and the box shape, but also has two significant effects on bump-handling: the wheelbase is fairly short so front-to-back pitching is intensified compared to a typical long cargo bike, and second, some amount of the weight is ahead of the front tires which exaggerates hops.

That all must sound awful.  Its not really awful, its just a Nihola is not really the best machine for traversing crappy pavement.

In response to this, I keep the pressure in the front tires fairly low when in commuting mode.  This is luxurious on the rough sections.  I like it better than my commuting bike (700C 37-622 tires).  They aren't so low that I notice the drag, but I'm not so fast anyway.  Personal preference I guess.  The main drawback of this is that I bump a front rim on an abrupt edge a couple times a week, but this hasn't resulted in a pinch flat yet.  Perhaps the thick rubber anti-puncture layer in the Marathon Pluses is controlling the pinching force.  I also try to pack my bag to handle a bit of bumping, leave the kid seat at home, and I try to remember to go a bit slower around those edges.  (Generally these are short curbs.)

Ambitious owners could change the tires for something slightly fatter, definitely at least 2" would fit front and back.  I would like to try some Big Apple Plus 20x2.15 (55-406) and 26x2.15 (55-559) some day.

Thanks to the one-piece frame, its also possible to unload one front tire on short notice by abruptly steering while leaning the wrong way.  This can be used to hop a tire onto a substantial curb, at some speed and without any harm.  Theoretically this could also be used to "float" a tire over a pothole, but it does disrupt the path of the trike a bit, so I don't do that unless I'm turning anyway.  This also doesn't work as well when loaded, because the center of gravity is generally lowered by cargo.