One of the biggest surprises of parenthood has been dealing with the overwhelming amounts of stuff. Take going to the beach, for example. Before kids, a quick beach trip was as complicated as putting on a pair of shorts over a bathing suit, tossing a tallboy in a backpack, and biking to the water.
Now, I do a 30-minute scamper around the house while grabbing and stuffing items in a bag like a hamster stockpiling for winter. Water bottle? Check. Toddler bathing suits and towels? Check. Diapers? Sand toys? Check. And that’s before I get to all the pandemic-related gear, like child-sized masks and hand sanitizer.
Luckily, for the past week, I’ve been riding the Urban Arrow Family. For sheer convenience, nothing beats a Dutch-style front-loading cargo electric bike. Rather than carefully tucking all our gear into different packs and panniers, I can just toss everything into the big cargo box, and that includes my kids.
“Isn’t that terrifying?” my neighbor called out one day, as she saw me set off down the street with the front box full of UPS packages.
Weirdly enough, it isn’t. Urban Arrow is a Dutch company, the land from whence the front-loading cargo bike (also called bakfiets) originated. So it’s not surprising that I found the Family to be both comfortable and surprisingly maneuverable, even though it has a cushy seat, curved handlebars, and a sit-up style frame instead of the straight handlebars and more forward-leaning style that I prefer.
A lot of that maneuverability is due to the shape and style of the cargo basket. Unlike other bike boxes, the floor (which is an easy-to-clean grate) sits at the bottom of the front chassis, instead of lying on top of it. This puts the box—and therefore the cargo—several inches lower than on other front cargo bikes, which makes it feel more stable.
The box itself is about 27.5 inches across, which includes a few inches for the protective aluminum top tube (like a kiddie roll bar) and two inches of heavy-duty expanded polystyrene foam, which is the material often used to pad motorcycle helmets. My kids felt pretty secure inside, and it was wide enough for both the 3- and 5-year-old to sit side by side on the included padded seat. I do have gangly spider children, though. It would probably be a tight fit if they were much bigger.