Trends and perceptions

At work, two colleagues have in the past few years been shopping for cargo bikes/trikes and ended up with two-wheelers despite having me gently feed them testimony of life with a trike.  (The front brakes do make a Nihola a difficult sell in Oslo, so maybe that was blunting my otherwise smooth sales pitch.)  I don't think these two colleagues have made poor choices in the end, and I've never even riden a cargo bike, so who am I to judge?  People just love two-wheelers.  Related observation: trikes that tilt are trending (see Butchers & Bicycles MK1, Babboe Carve, Sblocs).  Generalized: it seems to me that the greatest challenge to trikes is the way people view them, which is apparently slow.  Maybe slow and boring, who knows.

Does a tilting trike actually address a real issue, or just a trike-newbie's perception of a real issue?  (The classic box trikes where the whole box rotates do have an issue.  Perhaps this is the root of the problem.)  I don't doubt that an empty tilting trike can corner faster than an empty Nihola, but who is qualified to say if that additional potential for speed makes any sense?  We are talking about a heavy machine either way, a machine designed primarily to carry your own kids.  My recollection of driving the Nihola with kids on board is that I could already drive dangerously fast (with a downhill slope to assist) and that I could hold the magic 25km/hr perfectly safely on flat ground.  It corners pretty well, and gets better with more load in front.

In case someone wandering the internet searching for opinions on this matter should find their way here, I want to state clearly that I think tilting trikes represent pointless complexity and have significant drawbacks, when compared to a one-piece design such as Nihola.  (Yes I know, these words will vanish into the vast vortex of the internet, where they shall be entirely irrelevant in the face of social trends.)  I must say I have never ridden a tilting trike.  I have heard from my colleague doing his shopping that the tilting hardware can make you suffer in difficult situations, and I certainly believe that.  I specifically like the feature of the Nihola that it is one piece and no nonsense, its good for climbing curbs, parking crooked on the roadside, starting again, climbing steep hills, and generally doing whatever is asked without a fuss.  I note the high load floors of the tilters, and I look at the additional moving parts, to me this all screams of a solution that is worse than the problem it was intended to address.

Now, I'm not just someone wedded to one particular manufacturer of trikes.  (Though my particular brand of choice does stand out.)  I saw this the other day in Oslo, looks like a fat-tire, no-tilt, disc brake, proper-steering trike.  Seems to be made in Asia, and sold as CargoKid in Denmark.  Comes only with electric assist, and I wonder if those tires can possibly be sufficiently durable.  Quite interesting, I would give it considerable thought if I was in the market.

its a CargoKid product, not a Nihola

I've been spending some time today catching up on the state of things, and I got reading in depth about the Swedish maker Livelo, which was openly inspired by Nihola.  I like a lot of their choices, although I would hesitate to choose a bike/trike that is too optimized for child transport, it should also work after the kids grow up, after all.  I could make a similar complaint about the CargoKid trike above.  My trikes have certainly gotten some paint damage from transporting awkward items such as wood and other bikes, don't imagine that would go well on fabric.

a picture grabbed from the Livelo page

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.

Tight Spots

The design of the normal passenger-carrying Nihola represents an interesting set of tradeoffs between internal volume and the space it needs.

Consider the barriers that guard the entrances to many a bike path in Oslo and Copenhagen.  Often enough a series of rocks are used, set just over 90cm apart, which is fine for a Nihola.  A more advanced solution is an offset pair of metal gates, fences, or concrete blocks.  There is generally not a straight path through, so to pass between them and onto the path, generally a cyclist (or baby-wagon-pusher) needs to zig-zag.

Today I took a pictures of my Nihola navigating between one of them near where I live.

Park anywhere...

This one leaves no more than a couple centimeters of clearance between the right tire and the front corner on the way down, and just before starting this turn, it is necessary to be within a few centimeters of the fence with the left tire.  (Uphill is easier because its possible to put the left tire onto the plants before turning between the gates.)  This is not an unusual situation.  An unusual situation is either: 1) having room to spare or 2) not having enough room at all.  This is true in both Copenhagen in Oslo.  Must be some kind of standard.

The special Oslo wrinkle on this is that the two of these nearest where I live are both on steep hill sections.

There is another one of these a few km away that I can only navigate with the perfect approach angle, and only if I don't have pannier bags installed.  The clearance is that tight.  On the positive side, it is easy to turn a Nihola by lifting the back (so long as there isn't something heavy on the cargo rack).

The interesting thing here is that if the Nihola had a square box of the same length and width, it wouldn't fit.  In many gates, the strangely rounded shape is essential.  But what about other types of cargo carriers?  I can only speculate: the long cargo bikes have a problem with length and turning behavior but are narrower, the box trikes rotate the whole box, which is probably helpful for tucking in those corners.

Also interesting is the doorway pass-ability of a Nihola.  It seems that standard doorways can be navigated with just a small bit of steering of the tires.  Its easiest to pull the Nihola forwards through tight doors in my experience.

Balance

I imagine that most serious bikers that try a Nihola, or other trike, will hate their first ride.  Trikes don't ride like bikes, they don't turn like bikes, they don't handle bumps like bikes.

It doesn't work to sit rigidly perched on top of a Nihola.  It doesn't tilt into corners or point upwards when navigating a side slope.  You tilt into the corners, you point upwards on side slopes.  At moments when the trike is about to do something dramatic, you need to get a bit off the seat and relax, so that the trike can do what it is going to do, while your balance is not upset.

Consider how a person can balance on a trike like the Nihola.  The contact points are the same as on a bike: hands, feet and seat.  However the trike moves in various ways dictated by the road surface, none of which have anything to do with whether you are leaning one way or another.   So you really ride on top of a Nihola, whereas you feel more one with a bike.  At first, a lot of the balancing work being done by the hands.  But the hands also steer the trike, and the steering feeds back into the rider's balance.  After some time, I learned to balance on top of the Nihola with a lot less help from my hands, and this is an essential skill for anyone who is going to anything interesting on one.

Take for example a speedbump that extends almost the whole way across a road, leaving insufficient room to sneak a trike (or trailer) by cleanly.  These are not terribly common in my experience (usually in Oslo the speed bumps give no special treatment to bikes, and usually in Copenhagen they leave a nice flat bike lane), but they are noteworthy.  Both my wife and I got a bit of a surprise the first time we ran over the edge of one of these bumps with a Nihola, with just a week or two of experience.  We were both sitting there on the Nihola, stiff like statues, and all the sudden the front tire encountered the bump.  The frame of the Nihola happily and mercilessly followed.  She says she just about crashed, I didn't quite have that experience, but it was a surprise anyway.  The problem was that the trike pushed its rider around, and the rider pushed and pulled on the trike trying to stay balanced, including pulling and pushing on the handle bars, upsetting the direction of the trike.  Conclusion: when navigating nasty stuff, get off the seat and relax.

A similar experience awaits when using a driveway to transit between a road and a sidewalk.  One tire is going to hit the slope first, and if the trike is moving at a good clip, there will be some dramatic road-surface-following going on.  Off the seat, relax, no problem.

When I'm riding around on a Nihola, I am comfortable enough to be a bit careless with balance, and sometimes I have to use my hands to save the day.  Its important at those moments to be able to use the handlebar as a balance aid without turning it.  Its just a skill to master like any other.  There main motion here is pushing sideways (i.e. cleanly left or right) on the bar, to avoid steering.  (Interestingly this motion is precisely what steers a trike like Christiania trike.)

I was not able to go very fast on a Nihola before I had developed a quiet upper body.  The problem was that I kept making steering adjustments without intending it, very likely while maintaining balance using the handlebar.  My first step was to concentrate on keeping my weight off my arms, but I graduated from that and now lean on the bar as much as I like.

Holding the handlebar in the center has a role to play with balance as well.  I find that doing this frees my shoulders to move more and opens the path to more powerful pedaling, up to and including standing up on the pedals.  But you can't do it before you get pretty comfortable with balance, because the hands have very little leverage to work with when they are right next to each other at the centerline of your body.  I'm still working on my pedal-while-standing technique and am not very smooth yet.

So if there is a conclusion here, its that there is actually a lot of balance involved in riding a trike.  People who think riding a trike is easier than a bike are being confused by the low speed stability of a trike.  Try doing something interesting, and there is a lot of skill involved.  And I'm not just talking about "you have to be good to not die if you pedal fast", I'm talking about skill that is required to do things that are safe.

Turning

The Nihola can turn.  If we just concentrate on slow-speed manuevers for a moment, it is very well behaved.  I can't imagine tipping over at low speeds, on level ground.

The turning radius is kinda big, almost car-like (and worse for some of the extra-size Nihola models), but if turning around that way is too much work, you can get off and lift the back very easily, and pivot the whole thing on the front wheels.  Turning radius of zero.  This works extremely well due to the position of the front tires, which are positioned to take most of the weight of the trike and around 100% of the weight in the box, so it works great even with two kids and a pile of crap up front.  Just jump off and pivot 180 degrees, jump on and go again.  Point the wheels straight while doing this.  Also having a rear cargo rack is nearly essential, to provide a handle.  It also works badly when you put a heavy load on the cargo rack.

Turning on a side slope is less easy, sometimes.  Basically if the hill is too steep you can't balance on it.  Also note that its easier to balance when the nose points down the hill than when it points up, because when it points up, your weight is balancing over the one rear wheel.  The trickiest part of a turn on a side-slope is the part where you are pointing uphill, maybe 45 degrees offset from directly up slope.  Its an interesting thing that its actually easier to go straight up a hill than angled up a hill.  So all that said, it has to be a significant slope to pose a problem.  On such a slope, it might be easiest to get off and turn by lifting the back.

Turning by lifting the back is a really awesome feature, in my opinion.

A trike such as the Nihola needs to be slowed for corners.  There are a few places on my commute that I slow down much more than the bikes need to.  Still I suspect that it can be cornered faster than any other cargo trike, because lifting the inside wheel is not really a cause for much concern.  It just means you have reached your cornering limit, and should fix the situation before you actually do tip over.  Basically, you are driving an oddly balanced bike at that point.

I sometimes deliberately run the inside wheel over a curb or dirt pile or whatever so that I can straighten the curve out and conserve momentum.  If I take the corner correctly, the inside wheel has so little weight on it that this happens smoothly.  While often ridiculous, this is actually a very sensible strategy at a particular place where I enter a road from a sidewalk with a small ramp, and turn sharp right.  I can drive the inside wheel right off the curb, while the outside wheel drives down the ramp, and dramatically reduce the amount of left-right steering and associated slowdown.

So, what about the situation where a Nihola rider finds him/herself going too fast when a turn needs to be made?  Well obviously scrub as much speed as possible before the turn starts, squeeze especially hard on the front brakes because the back can't contribute much (unless you have heavy pannier bags or something back there), and might start to slide, which is an unwanted distraction at the least.  Also, hard braking and hard cornering at the same time will require that you lean a lot and hold on tight.  Braking while lifting a tire sounds like a bad idea to me.

A Nihola will reliably understeer by lifting the inside wheel when asked to turn too sharply, but on some surfaces can be convinced to oversteer somewhat by using the back brake, together with the front brakes, a big steering input and considerable speed.  It is most easy to oversteer while simultaneously going down a hill, braking, and turning on a wet road surface.  Oversteer can quickly be corrected by straightening out the wheels and releasing the back brake.  I have never managed to do a 180, even in the snow, although I have certainly tried.  Probably just a matter of finding a suitable sheet of ice.

Some day I'll make a post about driving a Nihola in the winter, where I can go on about handling at the limits of adhesion.