Best or worst idea? Getting a Velotaxi/Rikshaw for private use

[sinewav]

Here's a fun video...

What a great video. Seeing two grown men drive that thing in less than ideal conditions is a big selling point. I want one!

[Word]

I'll still wait until a wall comes out of the back

The rest is feasible, but you know the Strassenverkehrsordnung. That would push the vehicles into the LCV class and open a whole can of regulatory worms.

Yep, but I also know the Bundesregierung and how our free-market-loving tempo-limit-hating liberal and social democratic politicians will almost certainly be in favour as long as it's good for the German car industry even if it's obscenely lethal! I'm sure if they ask the right people, they can begin production tomorrow, right next to that awful Tesla factory.

[Z-Man]

Absolutely, you're right! After all, you can trust us citizens to make responsible decisions for ourselves. Just because we would have the RIGHT to dump cores left and right does not mean we're going to use it every day!

The short version is, we're on Team Blue.
Well, anyway, that all would be the case, my hand is figuratively hovering over the order button. But an unrelated thing has come up that delays that.

These things are fun, no doubt about that. We had a lot of time with them; first it was with me in the back and Z-Wife in front, then Z-Girl took over driving, and apparently the next test drivers did not show up (I had checked before, there were no more time slots available), so we had both vehicles for us and I took a solo run, and Z-Girl also went solo for a bit. With Z-Wife, we got 'stuck' in a dead end at one point (well, the path would have taken us out of the park and implicit testing area). Well, stop, turn the wheel all the way to the left, pedal forward, relase the wheel. Instant 180. I was stupid and advised her to start the turn in the middle of the path, so the rear wheel went over grass for a bit; had we started on the left side, it would have been all clean. The biggest challenge probably is going to be to remember that other people will not be used to vehicles behaving that way.
Any combination of two of us fit easily. Getting into the rear is a tiny bit difficult, but still easier than on a two door car. There is ample of leg room in front, because your legs go around the driver. They even made the front seat very narrow in the lower half, so you can get as cozy as you want. These prototype units are almost suspension-less, but it was still more comfortable than a tram ride. Or the Renault Twizy.
Speaking of the Twizy, when we tested that way back, my main practical problem with it was that it has no central rear view mirror, because you would only see yourself in it; it also has no rear window. So you can't even look back by turning around. You are supposed to use the side mirrors, which are positioned so that you can see what is directly behind you. I found this difficult to get used to. This thing has the same basic setup and would have had the same problem... only somehow it did not? Maybe because without being pinned down by a seat belt, it's easier to just look around, you can just stick your head out to either side if need be.
The drive itself feels great. It is indirect; you pedal into a generator, there is no drive chain. That means you pedal against a constant resistance. And you just go. The brakes on the prototypes were a bit squeaky, but responded well. They are standard cargo bike hydraulic brakes and should be easy enough to maintain.

The hopper is not for everybody. It is slow, has limited range (with one battery; of course, you can basically take as many packs as you need), is expensive, and realistically, you can't drive it everywhere you can go with a regular bike. Like, for example, there are often barriers before bridges and railroad crossings that should prevent cyclists from just racing through without looking properly; some are simply too narrow and you have to take a detour. And some paths may just lead to conflicts. Narrow cycle lanes, or no cycle lane at all... But, it's a bicycle, has a roof, you can take out the battery and charge it wherever, and it's cute and fun. It may just be right for us.


Oh yeah, another project that is very similar and at a very similar development stage is the Squad (Content warning, fullscreen video on autoplay). It also has small batteries you can realistically swap individually and is supposed to be cheaper. It's in the same class as the S04, a light vehicle, with a slow version you can drive at at younger age. It's not as cool, though.

[Lucifer]

Get you a couple of 125-150cc Chinese scooters. Relatively inexpensive, as environmentally friendly as an ICE vehicle can be, and can easily carry Z-Girl on either Z-Man or Z-Woman's bikes. Top speeds around 70-80km/h (probably more and I'm doing the conversion factor wrong, I've pushed 'em up to 55mph), and if you're that worried about emissions, you can put catalytic converters on them. I *was* riding a 50cc Yamaha (I know, not Chinese) that had fuel injection and a catalytic converter and was classed as a ULEV (Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle).

There are electric scooters on the market in the same class as the 50cc-150cc scooters I'm talking about, but I don't know where to buy them. But their battery packs are small enough that they can be charged with a reasonably small solar panel, theoretically. You'd obviously need street parking for that.

I don't know what the minimum age is to *drive* one of these things, but you shouldn't have a problem finding one that Z-Girl would be cool to ride rather than embarrassed.

Side note: Once my idiot roommate has moved out, I'm bringing my 50cc Honda Metropolitan into his old room to yank the motor. The first thing I'm going to do is see if I can chop off the ICE part of the motor and adapt it to take an electric motor. If I can do that, I'll convert it to electric on my own.

[Z-Man]

Scooters as an option were discussed, but dismissed. I quite liked the idea, but the girls did not, considering them too dangerous.

ICE scooters, or stinkers, were completely out. There are many good electrical ones, most with removable batteries as well. However, first, no roof. The rain here can be quite nasty. Also, there is some regulatory madness going on. Any motorized vehicle with an official top speed of AT LEAST 50 km/h is allowed on the Autobahn, and THEY did not want to allow small scooters there. For ICE ones, THEY just relied on limiting their power, but for the electric ones, THEY also imposed a hard speed limit of 45 km/h. 50 km/h is the speed limit on city roads, so you are always just a bit slower than the cars and other faster vehicles, provided they stick to the speed limit (they don't, at least not exactly). Which sucks. You also can't go on bike lanes. You are theoretically allowed to go on country roads, which have a speed limit of 70 or 100 km/h, depending on the local conditions. But I can't imagine that to be fun. Also, you are theoretically expected to wear protective clothing, like leather pants and jackets. Nobody does, though. Those things can be used age 15 and up here, age 16 in the rest of Europe. A license is required, the standard car driver's license suffices.
The next higher vehicle class has no hard speed cut, but they usually don't go over 80 or 90 km/h, so also not universally recommended for all roads. A special license is required (no big deal). And with those, you definitely need protective clothing if you go on the fast roads, which adds inconvenience.

The main "journey" (it's only 7 km one way) we need to make almost every week has a good, fast option over one of the faster roads and a nice short path full of bike/pedestrian only tracks, a scooter would need to make a sizable detour. Other journeys go overland and only have country road options with bicycle tracks on the side. No place for scooters. Also, did I mention the rain and lack of roofs?
There is a bus that, while not 100% reliable, goes directly from our street corner to Z-Girl's school, so that bit is taken care of. For the rest, bicycles cover about 70 percent of our regular transportation needs optimally. Scooters could maybe cover half of the remaining cases well. I am keenly aware we are a special case there, but the Hopper could cover it all.

(I don't personally mind the rain very much, I always have rain gear with me.)

[sinewav]

One thing I haven't seen discussed here is how easy are these things to repair? Do any use off-the-shelf parts? How expensive are parts? Easy to get? Can you do the repair yourself?

I started thinking in this direction when you mentioned the lack of a read window and though "just cut a hole?" Can they be modded?

[Lucifer]

Well I'm not going to change any minds, but I am going to strongly object to the idea that scooters/motorcycles are dangerous. They're only dangerous if you crash. In the last 4.5 years that I've been riding as my daily driver (50cc, then 150cc, then 125cc, now 250cc), I've had just as many injuries as anybody driving a car, which is None. While, on the one hand, I doubt y'all get the extreme rain we get in central Texas, I can sympathize with regular light rain being an issue. But at scooter speeds, you'd be safer on a scooter than on an electric bike, IN GENERAL, and in car traffic (we don't have the kind of bike connectivity you do). Also, we get those extreme downpours only for a couple of months a year, and they typically only last 10-30 minutes and I can outwait them. (Subtropical area means subtropical storms, they come in off the exact same gulf that spawned Katrina, or they come in from the west, starting in California and picking up strength until they whack us, but other than that, we have like 300+ days of excellent riding weather)

Your specific situation and the regulatory situation is surprisingly very different than mine. I was expecting some regulatory differences, but there's a few that definitely change the equation a bit. For one, starting at the 125cc class (or, I guess 4500W for electric scooters), you go just as fast as any car because the top speed limits you have to deal with are 45mph. You also only need a regular driver's license for that. I'm not surprised your city is more walkable than mine, seeing as how I'm out in the suburbs of a car-centric American city.

Tl;dr, I don't have a solution for you that's ready now. There are some interesting small EVs in the pipeline that you can preorder now, but may not be delivered for a year or longer, and are legal for bike paths in some jurisdictions. I watched a YouTube video where a guy was driving one, I believe in the UK, and it was legal on their bike paths.

There are some nice bicycle taxis on the road here that run with electric assist, but I have no idea where to find them for sale. It wasn't too long ago that all the bike taxis were custom built, but nowadays there are actual assembly lines, but again, I don't know where to find them for sale.

[Z-Man]

One thing I haven't seen discussed here is how easy are these things to repair? Do any use off-the-shelf parts? How expensive are parts? Easy to get? Can you do the repair yourself?

That was my first set of questions to them Yeah, they use standard parts for all the bits that are typically in need of replacement on a bicycle. Front tires are standard cargo bike tires, rear tire is a scooter one. Brakes are cargo bike hydraulic brakes. The battery is not standard-standard, but also a common model used in heavy cargo bikes: https://akkuenergiesysteme.de/en/powerpackplus/ The vehicle is light enough that to service the wheels, you just give it a push to the side and wedge something under it, depending on where you do that, you'll get the front or rear wheel into the air. There are no drive chain or spokes to worry about; you should be able to handle standard bicycle repair stuff yourself.

The motor is also not custom, but as it is a big hard to service block, it has to be sent to the manufacturer for any repairs. I forgot whether they even told us the manufacturer.

The steering system is custom, the body too, obviously. Any problems with those are likely to be messy and costly.

I started thinking in this direction when you mentioned the lack of a read window and though "just cut a hole?" Can they be modded?

Not by a rube like me For that particular purpose, notice that you'd have to cut three holes; it has a trunk and both the door and the rear wall are nontransparent, and there also is the head of your passenger. I'd probably rather just stick a camera out the rear end if needed. I don't think it will be, though; when driving, you don't have to worry about what's right behind you, and I can't think of a situation where you have to reverse into the unknown; you can turn around inside a standard car parking spot, after all.

They're only dangerous if you crash.

Yeah, well, umm. There is a newish saying for that here, "Merkste selber, ne?", roughly translated to "You see the problem with that yourself, don't you?", a rare case where German is shorter

I probably made the concerns sound bigger than they actually are. Scooters and small motorcycles are quite obviously fine in the US, with long distances, wide roads, and strict speed limits. The thing with traffic here in Germany is that it can be very antagonistic, with everyone trying to get an advantage, not to arrive earlier, but just to get ahead in front of the other guy. For example, if there is congestion, you're not supposed to enter a crossing if you can't leave yet, so the orthogonal traffic can pass unhindered. Think anyone adheres to that? It's worst if there are two lanes, or two lanes merging, because what happens if you do stop before the intersection is that the guy next to you will just go ahead anyway, change lanes, and take the spot you left open. It's the Prisoner Dilemma where you know 80% of the other players will rat you out.

The velotaxi link from my first post should still work, but of course you can get cheaper ones by searching Velotaxi on Alibaba. Usual words of caution apply. The ones I looked at, for example, would probably not be legally bicycles in Germany.

It was raining all day today, the kind where you get annoyingly wet after a kilometer or so. Z-Girl went out by bike anyway. Didn't mind. Fell down when she took a wet lowered curb at a sharp angle. Still did not mind. I had prepared the money transfer for the purchase and collected final confirmations. Go from me, I like my toys. Go from Z-Wife. No Go from Z-Girl. Not for embarrassment this time. It's too expensive for something we would use only about once a week, she says. Which is correct, even if we were using car sharing services every time, they'd cost about 1000 Euro per year, and the thing we're going to stops when she turns 18. The Hopper is only expected to be delivered middle to late next year, cutting down its benefit/cost ratio further. It's not that we did not know that before, we were just in "Nothing is too expensive for our kid's well-being"-Mode. And Z-Girl wants to go by bike anyway. Weird, because she complains about it every time, but I'll take it.

I'd write a book titled "How to raise sensible kids", if only I could figure out what it was we did

[Lucifer]

The motor is also not custom, but as it is a big hard to service block, it has to be sent to the manufacturer for any repairs. I forgot whether they even told us the manufacturer.

That sounds like a standard issue electric motor. They're all "user serviceable", and I've gone into quite a few of them (mostly starters and alternators), and they are, indeed, "user" serviceable. You generally don't repair electric motors, you replace them, which is one of the big criticisms of EVs in the US.

They're only dangerous if you crash.

Yeah, well, umm. There is a newish saying for that here, "Merkste selber, ne?", roughly translated to "You see the problem with that yourself, don't you?", a rare case where German is shorter

Heh, just don't crash. It's not that hard.

I probably made the concerns sound bigger than they actually are. Scooters and small motorcycles are quite obviously fine in the US, with long distances, wide roads, and strict speed limits. The thing with traffic here in Germany is that it can be very antagonistic, with everyone trying to get an advantage, not to arrive earlier, but just to get ahead in front of the other guy. For example, if there is congestion, you're not supposed to enter a crossing if you can't leave yet, so the orthogonal traffic can pass unhindered. Think anyone adheres to that? It's worst if there are two lanes, or two lanes merging, because what happens if you do stop before the intersection is that the guy next to you will just go ahead anyway, change lanes, and take the spot you left open. It's the Prisoner Dilemma where you know 80% of the other players will rat you out.

I'll give you the wide roads, but I'm in Texas, where the speed limit is informally 10mph above the posted limit. Austin just lowered their highest speed limits to 35mph in the hopes that people will slow down to 45. But in my experience, Texas drivers are more laid back than other drivers. That blocking the box phenomenon you're talking about, I saw that all the time in the Seattle area and basically every other metropolitan area I've driven through (quite a few, but I've only lived in like 3), but here in Austin, people really don't do it. Some people do, and they look like idiots when they do it because it'll just be one car. What we get is when the light turns yellow and then red, four-six more cars will drive through the light, holding up the direction that's green. But I'll also give you that I live in a motorcycle-friendly part of the country, but it's very antagonistic towards scooters. I used to drive my 150cc scooter at 45mph down a 35mph neighborhood street with a dedicated center turn lane, and people would pass me at 55+ just because they saw scooter and assumed I was going really slow. Saw a few people freak out when they realized how dangerously fast they were driving right by an elementary school. We also get people whining about all the barriers being built to separate the bike lanes. I kid you not, I saw someone on NextDoor actually complaining that he was afraid of hitting those standing flexible poles because he tended to sway down the road and he though the city should never have installed them. Then there were like thirty people pointing out that he's the reason we needed them. I also see a lot of genuine zipper merges, and whenever the asshole tries to jump the line, everybody will pull up tightly to the car in front of them to stop the asshole.

[Z-Man]

Heh, just don't crash. It's not that hard.

It's not that hard on any given specific day. To never crash is a lot harder. All it takes to fail is a bad combination. All that is required for you is a momentary lack of attention at the wrong time. If that coincides with other people doing something wrong, or some other unusual situation, you can quickly find yourself on the floor. And if you think you are always perfectly focused in traffic, you are fooling yourself All of my almost-crashes with cars in adult years were of the type where they did something very wrong, but I could have still been safer had I paid better attention. And, well, the one actual mild bike-to-bike crash I had was totally the other guys fault, he was stupid and I had no chance to see him coming. And once my handlebar just came off because the rod connecting it to the wheel broke. I was ascending a steep mountain, slowly, so nothing happened.
(Let's not talk about the time I slipped on the ice twice on the same spot in consecutive years or the time I rode against a lamppost for no reason, or when the front wheel of my tiny kickboard got caught in a pothole and I almost managed to not fall over)

[Lucifer]

Heh, just don't crash. It's not that hard.

It's not that hard on any given specific day. To never crash is a lot harder.

I'll give you that. I haven't crashed in the last five years (I'm rounding up, we're nearing March when I started this new odyssey of daily driving two wheeled motorized vehicles). But back in the day....

Ok, it wasn't my fault, and I *was* paying attention. Unfortunately, my one serious crash proves your point. It was night, the street wasn't well lit, and there was gravel from a recent resurfacing. It was near my home (where most crashes happen, literally near *my* home), and it was at the corner where the street walkers worked. I didn't see any cars in front of me, so I was bangin' it, as usual. 450cc motorcycle. Not real big, but plenty of fun. Currently riding a much smaller 250cc. Anyway, out of nowhere, right in front of me, there appeared a shitload of brake lights. What was happening that I couldn't see was that there was a guy driving without his lights on, and he'd stopped to proposition one of the hookers. Of course, when he pushed his brake pedal, his brake lights came on, and he was several car lengths short of the stop sign. I was going a speed where I could handle discovering there was a car *at* the stop sign, but this didn't work. When I emergency braked, my front wheel locked up and I went down on the right. Road rash. I looked like a mummy had a baby with a zombie. It was awesome. Blood all over the gas tank, not quite so awesome. No broken bones, though. The hooker refused to provide service to him, as is her right, and instead took his license plate number. I talked to a lawyer, but we ended up deciding that going after the guy wasn't worth it. He probably didn't have any money, and even if he did, the hooker probably wouldn't testify. She did call 911 and tell me to quit being an idiot and wait for the ambulance, and I stopped being an idiot and did what she told me to do.

More recently, there's the time I hit a food trailer. That was silly. My throttle was sticking, and I was cruising through the parking lot looking for it. As soon as I spotted it, I revved the throttle, but instead of retracting, it stayed where it was. I hit the hitch, because I managed to steer it clear of the body of the trailer. Then there's the time I just fell over, while delivering pho, because I was riding a scooter with wide handlebars and I failed to sway my body to accomodate the U turn I was taking, so instead I kept slowing down to tighten my turn radius until I was going too slow for the bike to keep its balance on its own. There was a near miss on my motorcycle where I was zipping through traffic on Congress, out in front of the capitol, and I was weaving, and I thought I saw a spot and went for it, then realized I was about to get crushed. When I hit the brakes, my front wheel locked up. But I was going slow enough that I threw my legs out and caught the bike. I was on a delivery then, too. I made sure to give a very embarrassed expression to the guy who nearly crushed me and wave some gratitude because he also hit his brakes trying not to kill me. I hope he understood.

I won't even start with all the near misses from other people's driving, because I actually drive pretty defensively so none of them were all that dangerous, it was just a lot of "Hey, take your head out your ass and pay attention to what's on the road!" Mostly sideswipes, often during left turns, not necessarily my left turn.

My overall lesson here being that you probably cause most, if not all, of the crashes you were almost in. I'm a lot less stupid about my driving now, but most of my "I almost killed myself doing something stupid on a bike" stories happened in the last five years.

And that's ignoring my striking tendency, especially when driving through a construction area, for me to try to swerve to the side to grind on the wall because I'm not going fast enough. This is not a joke, I really do that. Luckily I haven't managed to complete the maneuver yet.