Tandem Cycling - Tandem commute

Yep, wife and I commuted in to work today on our new-to-us used Burley Duet. It was fantastic! I've been commuting in for the better part of this month, and we've been doing recreational rides around our town to get used to the tandem and figure out if it's something we're into. Sure enough, we love it. Luckily, we work at the same place, same hours, so the commute is actually feasible... and even a real "Well, duh we should be tandem commuting" situation.

I'd done bike commuting before, but the trip was only 7 mi, one way. Where we live/work now, the commute is 35 mi r/t. I was even hesitant to do it on a single bike, but once I got into it, no problem. She was psyched to have done the ride into work under our own power and it looks like something we're keen to keep on doing. That might change after the ride home, or tomorrow morning, but for now, it looks like we are going to have a great time doing a lot of riding together.

We worked up to the milage with some short rides, then longer loops. A few weeks ago, we did 12 mi, then 15, and then a 20 mi loop including some dirt. All in an area with many more hills than the commute. Having tested out OK, and having gained the tandem specific skills and confidence needed to ride in commuter traffic, we decided to do it. We are so thrilled!

Anyway, just wanted to share. Happy tandem couple on this end!

That's great. We've been commuting by tandem since 2001, when we bought our first tandem. Like you, we also work at the same place, so there has been no need to ride solo. Further to that our son and daughters day care is close to work, so we also commute with them. My son now has crank shorteners on the back of the Bike Friday Tandem and my daughter is on her bike seat, either on Mums bike, or on the back of the tandem.

I'm really going to miss tadnem commuting when our son goes to school and we'll have to have different working hours to accommodate drop-off and pick-up times. Maybe I can get my daughter riding the tandem to day care.

We just started tandem commuting, too. My wife's hooked, now she feels bad on days she has to drive. It's about 7 mi to her work from home, then another 3 for me solo. I've really been surprised at the rides she has been willing to tackle on the tandem. I think she feels confident that I can always pull us home if she bonks, but she just keeps going!

Good for you guys! I regularly commute and think it would be a blast on the tandem, but Pam's office is on the complete other side of town from mine. As a novelty, we tandem commuted during Bike to Work Week, but I had a single bike staged near her office for my ride across town. We pretty much had a blast that week, but felt like it got us home too late to be doing it on a regular basis. Not to mention the fact that we kept stopping for dinner!

The sad thing is that she used to work just a couple of blocks from me and we never took advantage of the opportunity when it was available to us.

My wife and I rode our new (to us) Rodriguez to work a while back, but we generally stick to our separate bikes for commuting (especially now that its not the same location). Many workplaces now are set up for storage of regular bikes, but a tandem is a bit of a storage nightmare in most facilities.

I've been commuting on a single ever since I got my first real job 25+ years ago. We got our new tandem in April and I decided I would ease my wife into tandem commuting. I started by soloing in once each week and then we would ride home together. We did a couple of weeks with 2 rides home and now Shelly's ridden in a couple of times as well. The problem is not really the commute (it's only 4.5 miles in, although we always stretch the ride home) but Shelly is still trying to work out the bugs involved with making herself presentable after she gets to work. We are very fortunate with all the issues - storage, available shower, work near each other, etc. I'm trying not to get too excited about her riding in for fear that I will scare her off before she can become addicted to it.

Jeff

Tandem commuters, unite!!
This is great to hear about some other tandem commuters. My wife and I work at the same place. We just started commuting via tandem a few weeks ago. 29 miles RT. A mix of rural/small town. One route is relatively flat but there are four RR crossings and two of those can be at least ten minute wait while the train crawls past. The other route is shorter by a mile, but goes over a very abrupt hill about 300'+ high. The climb adds about 8 minutes to the commute. Just can't seem to go fast enuf down the other side of the hill to make up the difference!
We work rotating shifts. 12 hour shifts, 0700 - 1900 one set of shifts, then 1900 - 0700 the next. It's a real treat to pedal home after working all night.
We commuted on singles one summer over a decade ago, but my wife's neck and back muscles got all pinched up and we quit riding altogether. She's short (4'11") and I was never able to get her bike set up correctly for her. I think (hope) the tandem solves the fit problems and we can cover the distance faster than with two singles. The best time we ever did way back then on singles was 48 minutes. That was after several weeks of riding and slowly getting faster. We got there in 47 minutes the other day on the tandem. Regardless of what Lance Armstrong says, it was the bike :p
We're going to be dealing with semi-darkness very soon on the morning half of the dayshifts. I'm leaning towards a DiNotte LED headlamp, the NiMH version. Anyone have some good strong headlamps to recommend?

Anyone have some good strong headlamps to recommend?

Running a Schmidt generator front hub serves very well when using a tandem as real transportation. The bike has spectacular, bright lights all the time. Imagine having to remember to charge the headlight batteries before driving a car at night? That's just silly.

The generator lighting systems are also fairly integrated into the whole bike, so, unlike most battery lights, you don't really mess with removing anything when you lock up the tandem and leave it on its own.

New LED headlamps like the IQ Fly and the new Edelux are simply superb in their light output, both for seeing and being seen. Great stuff!

-Greg

I commute with my wonderful 9 (soon to be 10) year old daughter on a tandem during the summers, where her summer camp is close to my work. She's great company, and a real engine back there. We have the added bonus of having the Hudson River alongside most of our commuting route in New York City. Our commute is about 25 mi. r/t, with a mix of hills and flat terrain.

Rich

We did the commute again last Thursday, and this coming week, we'll kick it up to two days. Last weekend, we went out for some longer loops over local backroads--22mi Saturday, and 26mi Sunday. It is so great to get out on our rural roads. It's haying season, so there's all kinds of activity in the fields and hay trucks on the road. We went down roads local to the area that neither of us have ever been on in the decades we've lived here. Saturday, we stopped for ice cream and saw a heron and a bunch of turtles in a pond near the ice cream place. Sunday, we found a public woods that neither of us had heard of or ever even seen from the car. A roadie passed us like we were standing still at one point, but we'll get there...

Gotta brag on my wife here for a moment--she used to bike all over the place a couple of decades ago, but has only done recreational riding in the past couple of years and not much of that. I don't think she's even been on a bike since last Summer, but we got the Burley, started doing rides, did our 35mi commute last week and again this week. So she's up to speed over the course of only a couple months, from zero to a 35mi commute. Woah! I'm impressed--last week, we logged a total of 95 mi on the tandem.

This past week we got a flat within .5 mi of work. Dang. Easy enough to change the tube, and a pleasant surprise: found out the rear hub is a Phil Wood. W00t! The front is clearly marked a Suzue, and I didn't really bother looking at the rear... until I noticed it while changing the tube. Made my day, in spite of the flat.

Next week, we're aiming for two tandem commute days.

The STP (Seattle-to-Portland) run started early Saturday morning. We live/commute near the mid-point. Pedaling home from a nightshift at about 0730 I half-expected to see some of the hotshots blow past us, but none did. Some guys in front of the Eagles tried to get us to stop for breakfast, but I said, "We're commuting!"
We turned off the STP route and started the climb up our rural road. Birds were singing, sun was up, the air was wonderfully cool, and the road was quiet. At that moment pedaling a tandem home from work seemed like a pretty good way to go!
On the commute back to work early this evening we saw a couple of hundred cyclists still coming into town on the other side of the road. Temp was 87 degrees, not quite so pleasant as in the morning. Most of the bikers seemed preoccupied, understandable after 100 miles in the heat.

Saw two tandems out of the mass of singles.