Downhills

A short post.  Niholas, with a confident rider and in the right situations, are surprisingly easy to drive very quickly downhill.  Well in this case "very" means perhaps 35-40km/hr, to speeds where the wind roars in the ears, and guys in stretch pants riding racing bikes can't pass a coasting trike without pedaling.  It basically gets easier the more weight is in the box, and the lower and more behind-the-front-axle that weight is.  A loaded Nihola goes down a hill like a cannon ball.  A 20kg kid or two really stabilizes things, and the trike runs smoothly through the corners and pavement imperfections, but an empty Nihola with well-pumped tires is a bit jittery.  I've pedaled (sprinted) to about 35km/hr (based on a GPS track) but generally at those speeds its best to concentrate on smooth driving, and plan well ahead in case it might be necessary to stop.  Definitely a good idea to remember that stopping takes a while.

Gravel downhills work great too, so long as the bumps are not large enough to start throwing people and trikes around.  The tires and frame can smooth out a half-decent gravel road very well with a kid or two in the box, and it just seems to get smoother with speed... just avoid washboard and holes.

Niholas are also great fun on downhills when there are slippery corners.  In this past winter I was doing three-wheel slides in the snow, and in the summer I have a time or two had the chance to push it to the limit on dirty pavement.  I can't recall going nuts on gravel but I think it could be fun too.  I've noticed that in the summer, when riding fast and using the back brake hard, it tends to have abrupt consequences on directional stability.  Its perhaps more fun to squeeze 100% out of the front brakes and corner until the inside tire starts sliding.

Oh, and my kids love speedbumps.

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.

As a Commuter

A winter commute near Copenhagen, before moving to Oslo.

A Nihola can reach a pretty decent speed on level ground.  I find 20-25km/hr to be sustainable for long distances, which is plenty fast enough in my world that top speed is not the limiting factor on commute time.  When my wife and I first got a Nihola we didn't see how anyone could go nearly that fast, this due to the way balance felt, but once we adjusted to the way a trike needs to be ridden it was no longer a problem.  So while in the beginning balance was my limiting factor, now strength is my limiting factor.

Also, while commuting strenuously on the Nihola with the SRAM P5, I find my knees become sore.  I believe this is due to the rather large steps between gear ratios, combined with the effort of moving the trike.  On mostly level ground 5th is a bit too fast and 4th is significantly too slow.  The SRAM P5 lovely hub, but a poor choice for trying to set cargo bike speed records.  I don't believe that I have the knee problem on our Nexus 8 Nihola, which puts 7th and 8th gears close together, and right where I need them.  (Without going totally off into a discussion on gearing, I should say that both trikes have a 24t rear sprocket and 38t front, lower than the "factory" ratio.)

So, how hard is a Nihola to pedal when its empty?  I'll start with some numbers.  On flat stretches, I mainly use 5th gear on the SRAM P5, giving 64 gear-inches with my sprockets.  On my commuting bike on the same sections, I use 6th gear on a Nexus 7, giving 70 gear-inches with my sprockets.  I pedal at similar rates on both machines, but work a bit harder on the Nihola.  Anyway using this I estimate my Nihola speed on flat ground is 90% of my bike speed.  Of course this isn't any racing bike: 28"-37mm puncture-resistant tires, nearly straight bar, Nexus 7 hub, full fenders, rack, cargo basket, dynamo lights, 16kg, dirty, various rattles...  So you could say I'm not fast on any bike, but not really slow on a Nihola either.

The amount of load seems to make little difference on level ground, but it makes more difference if the front tire pressure is low.  When there is unfavorable wind the Nihola drags more, but actually nowhere near as badly as I had feared before I tried it.  (But taking down the rain cover is important to minimize the drag.)  Up hills, the weight of the machine (32kg is the official figure) naturally slows a person down, but again its not catastrophic.  How about loaded, up hill and against a headwind?  Well, you'll be thankful you don't need to worry about balance.

The riding geometry is somewhat upright, but not overwhelmingly so, in my judgement.  Less upright than WorkCycles Cargobike, unless my eyes are playing tricks.  More upright than a Bullitt, but I'm sure that surprises no one.  Since moving to Oslo I have become a big fan of placing both hands in the middle of the handle bar, which I believe improves my body position and is helpful when pedaling hard.  I find this is more natural than doing the same on a bike, where doing such a thing harms my balance.

I find that a Nihola can be a comfortable commuter, but the road surface should be in decent condition and there should not be too many abrupt corners.

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.