Transporting Children on Bikes

Riding a bicycle in the city can be a dangerous activity. Not hugely dangerous, but definitely somewhat dangerous. There is no doubt about it. You have to be smart and cautious to avoid being a statistic. But cyclists, for the most part, are only risking themselves. In a typical collision, the cyclist may be badly injured or killed and the bike wrecked, but the driver will usually be uninjured while the car ends up with only a few dents or scratches.

Every once in a while, though, I’ll see cyclists risking not only their own lives, but their children’s too.

The other day as I walked down Woodbine Road in Toronto, I saw a woman and her young child bomb by on a bike. It’s hard to say how old the child was because the bike flashed by me at such high speed. The child was behind the woman, held in a rear-mounted child seat. Woodbine is a major, four-lane road. At the time of day when the woman and her child passed me, traffic is fairly light on this road and, therefore, cars and trucks sometimes travel at fairly high speed. Moments after the bike went by I saw a truck rocket by at what must have been 60 kmh or more. This truck would have passed the woman and her child moments later, very likely in the same lane.

Believe me, I’m all for people using their bikes in town, but I feel that if you want to take your kid with you, either on a bike seat or in a trailer, you really should keep to bike paths and side streets. If you have to cross a major street, dismount and briefly become a pedestrian.

I do have to point out that what I am saying in this post is based on a gut reaction. I was unable to find any numbers for crashes, injuries, or deaths involving children riding in bike seats. An article in The Boston Globe dated May 24, 2014, says: “Statistics about the dangers of biking with children are hard to find. No health or safety agency has information broken down that way.”

I also wondered which of the two methods of transporting young children on bikes was safer. Every source I found said that trailers were safer than rear- or front-mounted child seats. Please note, though, that it is very important to have a high-flying orange flag attached to a trailer to make it more visible to drivers.

An article posted by Parachute reported, “bike trailers are considered somewhat safer because children are lower to the ground and have less of a distance to fall in a crash.”

ConsumersReports.org had this to say: “trailers can tip over if you turn abruptly or turn when one wheel is going over a bump.” But they went on to say that bicycle trailers provide “some protection to passengers since kids are seated, strapped in, and usually enclosed in a zippered compartment. Trailers have a rigid frame enclosed in durable fabric, which offers some protection for young passengers if the unit rolls over”

The American Academy of Pediatrics says that “preferably, children should ride in a bicycle-towed child trailer.”

Please consult the web pages I mentioned for detailed safety instructions on using bike trailers.