Unfortunately, placing your child in a rear-mount carrier seat carries risk, as does strapping your child into an SUV, or crossing the street. The Zigo Leader is designed for safety. The forward-position of the ChildPod places children where they can be observed, a position favored by most parents. Unfortunately, vehicular hazards come from all directions, not just frontal, and the ones unseen are the most dangerous. This is why direct observation is so important. The ChildPod has a bumper and a crumple zone designed to withstand frontal collision at bicycle speeds. Furthermore, while the Zigo Leader is novel in many ways, Dutch Cargo Bikes have a long history of use in Europe, where they know a little more about commuter biking than we do in the U.S. The front-loaded Bakfiets is in Europe the preferred vehicle for child transport by bike.

I wholeheartedly back Michael up here. Firstly “plowing into” things is a rather atypical bicycling accident and at the speeds one travels on such a trike its unlikely that that built-in crush zone will even be damaged.

No matter where the kids are located there’s always a critic who’ll point out and overstate the danger: “kids in front will serve as bumpers”, “kids in trailers will get crushed by motorists who only see mom on the bike ahead”, “kids in the middle…”. you name it, I’ve heard it. Its all just uninformed speculation and an irresponsible cheap shot for an attention grabbing headline.

My company Workcycles has sold thousands of child carrying bicycles of various formats including standard type bicycles with child seats front and rear (and sometimes both), long wheelbase bicycles and trikes with the kids in a box forward of the rider, long wheelbase bikes with two kids behind the rider and family tandems where little tikes pedal along in front of mom or dad. Dutch kindergartens use our bikes to ferry up to 8 kids around. Obviously they’re all designed with appropriate safety features.

We periodically hear comments such as the author’s from passersby (non-customers thus) but haven’t seen any of these supposed dangers in practice. The occasional fall or accident has results mostly in minor bike damage and bruised egos. Sure, sooner or later a tragedy can happen, but it probably won’t be the particular format of the bicycle to blame.

Fact is that cycling, especially the careful utility cycling one does with kids aboard just isn’t especially dangerous. Here in the Netherlands millions of people cycle daily for both transportation and recreation and only the competitive cyclists in group rides wear helmets. Mass carnage on the roads? Hardly. The number of cycling related deaths each year can generally be counted on one hand.

-Henry

Well the safest thing will be to sit in front of TV and not go out and for heavens sake don’t bike at all! In fackt don’t go out, it might kill you!

Wait, that is dangerous as well, you fat, you get heart attack!