Cycling with baby

Children can use designated seats for bicycles from when they're around one year old. (Or nine months, in Wacky Holland.) This means I can't go cycling with Frog until next spring. (Winter will get in the way.)

But there has to be a way around this. This very responsible-seeming gentleman has a convincing solution: Child seats for cars can be fastened in the box of a cargo bike. He does not recommend fastening them on the racks of normal bicycles.

I am one of maybe five people in this town with a front-loading cargo trike. So I almost owe it to the world to make good use of it.

I had some adaptors (below) which are meant to fasten the child's car seat to a stroller. (Stroller, check. Car, well, no. But car-less peope still nead the car seat, just in case.)

I built a frame inside the trike's box for stability. This also creates compartments which might be nice when carrying gear. One reason I want this to work is so we can all go to the beach, and the stroller, besides being slower than a bicycle, has almost no cargo capacity.

Bus? Sure, we can use the bus. But where's the challenge in that.

The seat now snaps nicely into the brackets. I want to fasten things properly before I actually go anywhere with this set-up.

This might not look too convincing, but the seat gets tightly wedged within the box, in addition to being clamped into the brackets.

I have just discovered that there is actually a gadget on the market designed specifically for fastening children's car seats to the box of a cargo bike. (It can also be used on a rack, for the more thrill-seeking parent.) I notice this thing provides some suspension, and this has led me to reconsider my design.

We'll see.