Originally Posted by
PlanoFuji
LexKing. Thanks for the link; however, those have the same issue I mentioned. They don't work with infants (or whatever the term is for the period from birth to about a year). I am truly curious what parents of really young children do to take their infants to the doctor, etc.. if they are without a car and rely on bicycles for transportation. Since it doesn't appear that any devices are made to safely transport children that young.
None of the carfree people I personally know are in this situation, but none of them would be able to rely on public transit (too limited in origins and destinations) to accomodate routine child medical care not to mention more urgent (but not emergency) care.
It's been a few years (almost a quarter-century), but when I was the parent of an infant we did a lot of walking to such things. We lived, on purpose, near the local hospital in a small city that could be walked end-to-end in about 90 minutes. There was maybe a five minute edge to driving to the hospital over walking and if an issue had arisen that was serious enough that five minutes mattered we would have called for an ambulance. It was a twenty minute walk to our pediatrician's office.
Our ancestors have more years invested in walking than our species has existed for. I'm not going to give up on it completely just because it is easier to pedal a bike.
By the way, we never did put our son into a trailer. When he was two years old he began riding stoker on a tandem; he just rested his feet on a stand. A year or two later that tandem was rebuilt as a rear-steer tandem with a kiddie crank and that's how he rolled for a few years, except when he wanted to ride his own bike. When we took the inter-city train we brought a whymcycle and rode double (once he was three years old). (A whymcycle is a scooter with the rear hub off-center so that the rear of the bike goes up and down as you move. It is propelled by a rhythmic pumping motion.)