Oregon Cycling Magazine

by Lane Kagay

What got you interested in workbikes?
In the early 80s, I was in Switzerland working on a farm, which was a forerunner of the CSA concept. We were trying to figure out how to move food from the farm to the city without using fossil fuels. We studied animal traction, but found that to be unrealistic. One of the farm partners provided some money for me to travel around Europe for a couple months to visit bike shops to look at different workbike designs, and I ended up compiling a huge collection of photos from all over the world of utility bikes that could carry cargo or passengers.

So this is 20 years before cargo bikes or so-called bakfiets were really known of here in the US, right?
In the 80s, when I returned to the states, I wrote an article for Bike Tech, Bicycling Magazine’s bike tech journal, and that was the first time there had been anything written in recent history at least that we knew of. This was in 1986.

While in Santa Cruz, California and downtown Manhattan, I was building prototype utility bikes. Shortly after arriving in Eugene, in about 1990, I published the Workbike Booklet that I sent out to people all over the world. This booklet contained photos and articles from around the world that related to bike culture and to cargo bikes, including the Xtracycle style work bike I built in ’87 (see photo). One of the people I sent this booklet to was the founder of Xtracycle, now one of the most well-known US workbikes.

So before that, were any other people doing workbikes in the US?
Worksman Cycles out of Ozone Park, New York was the only company I knew of that was doing workbikes. I visited them when I was living in Manhattan, and did an interview with them and took photos. In the late 80s in New York City, I made the first Long Haul prototype, utilizing cut-up bikes and muffler tubing.

And that was the bike that was based on the bakfiets design popular in Amsterdam?
My inspiration wasn’t so much the Dutch bakfiets as it was the Danish Long John and the English Long Emma. And also the ones that I saw in Switzerland that came from Denmark. All the European models had cheap tubing, single or three-speeds only, and lousy brakes.

So at some point you ended up on the west coast. How did that happen?
I came out here to work with the bike industry that was existing in Eugene. I shared shop space with Dick Ryan, the father of recumbents in the United States. Being in the same town with Bike Friday and Burley, and Co-Motion was very inspirational and helped me get going.

In 1990, I did a class on work bikes in Eugene. People came in and learned how to miter tubing, braze, and were introduced to work bike designs from around the world.

Now there is a shop in Portland that is importing Dutch cargo bikes—bakfiets—from Europe.
It seems to be the normal thing in the States to import everything we need, because we want things cheap and now, but it’s my belief that it’s always beneficial to go local, and that it will pay big time in the long haul, I mean long run.

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