Xtracycles? They’re For Lightweights!

(n.b. That’s a tongue in cheek title. We love Xtracycles.)

ANYWAY, having made that clear, take a look at this, which I found via the Bicycle Diaries:

Until the punchline, I thought it was going to be an advert from some lunatic “we’ve got a big enough army not to need to worry about any so-called impending fuel / climate / social breakdown crisis that [insert name here] keeps bleating on about” politician.

But no, it’s a railfreight company, with the sort of statistic that really will make more sense than you can shake a stick at some time in the next few years. On a small island like ours, rail struggles to compete with road haulage, but at a continental scale it makes a whole lot of sense.

But all this got me thinking about more local transportation of stuff. What’s the maximum sensible load to transport on a bike / by human power alone? I mean there are commercially available trailers,

and we’ve all seen pictures of guys from wherever with an entire year’s harvest, their family, and Mr Nextdoor’s refrigerator balanced on the crossbar:

But what are the limits to this? Hauling this 1,000 lb load might seem to be bordering on the insane:

Or is it just a perfectly sensible logical conclusion to this sort of backward-looking, low-tech, oil-free thinking?

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