ChiWhoBike #68

Published January 13, 2025
A woman stands smiling with a large red cargo bike, in a park with evergreen trees. She's wearing a long blue coat with black pants and light colored Converse, and has medium length black hair and light skin. Her bike is a bright red cargo Madsen cargo bike, with a large plastic bucket in the back.

I’m a single mom and I don’t drive, and I suffered for a long time in Chicago without a car, like lugging groceries around in a tiny bike basket or on the bus or train. And finally decided I wanted to invest in a proper bike for moving stuff around, including kids, all of her friends, her gear and everything. And I knew I wanted a bucket bike, so I decided to buy this from Madsen, which is a small business based in Utah. It looked nice, first of all, and they had really great reviews and are a really attentive family run business. I’ve had the bike now for a few years and they’ve been really great, like with replacing the battery, for example. And I use it to do Target runs, I’ve brought pieces of furniture, and it’s fantastic for that sort of thing. It’s an everyday utility family kind of a bike.

I’m not like a dyed-in-the-wool cyclist as much as I’m a public transport person. I know how to drive, but I haven’t driven (mostly) for like 17 years, because I lived abroad for 10 years and stopped driving because everywhere I lived had good public transport, and I got out of the habit. Then when we moved to the states, part of the logic of living where we live in Chicago is that we didn’t have to have a car. We live directly across the street from a train station. And I really believe in public transport as a project and when I lived in Europe I really strongly felt the difference in the built environment, and how there’s all sorts of implications of car dependency in the US.

I’d like to encourage more people to sort of take the plunge and consider biking as a good option outside of driving. I like the combination of the bike with public transport, and that basically covers all of our needs. If for any reason we need to take a trip out of the city, we can rent a car. It’s not that difficult. And the fixed cost is much, much lower in the long term than having a car. And I think that it’s a pro-social kind of choice, and an easy way for people to sort of create a collective culture, which I think is super important for sustainability and just for building our community.

A closer shot of the same woman standing smiling with her red cargo bike in a park, with some autumnal and bare trees in the background.
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