Biking With Babies: It's Becoming Popular, But is it Safe?

Over the course of raising three children, Green Streets Initiative director and seasoned cyclist Janie Katz-Christy fashioned a bike that got all the babies on board.

She strapped her oldest daughter into a bike seat 14 years ago, tucked her and her baby sister in a trailer a few years later and made space inside the trailer for her son when she took him on his first ride at just 10 days old.   

Amid the rush-hour traffic on Somerville Avenue, the sight of young children poised above concrete, albeit wearing helmets, might make some onlookers uneasy.

But for many parents, family cycling is the most comfortable way of getting around, and for them it's a risk worth taking. As cycling has become safer in Somerville and commuting by bike more popular, parents have fastened their infants and toddlers onto their bikes to ride to preschool, the grocery store and friends’ homes.

Assessing safety
Katz-Christy isn’t the only person who has ridden with an infant. Brian Postlewaite, a member and former chair of the Somerville Bicycle Advisory Committee, recently stowed his seven-month-old son in a car seat inside a bay between the front and rear wheels of his bike. The two of them went on their first ride together down the Minuteman Bikeway. Cargo bikes like his have become popular among parents for their capacity to store groceries and carry children until they are old enough to ride a bike of their own.

“I’ve seen people carry newborns in them,” Postlewaite said. “I’ve heard of people carrying kids home [from] the hospital in them.”

During one bike trip in Davis Square,  several parents stopped Postlewaite on the street to ask about the baby in the bike, he said.

“Everyone who said something thought it was great,” he said, adding, "We didn’t expect how interesting and neat it seemed. It definitely helped us think that this was a good decision. The fears that parents have—that making a decision that isn’t common across the board—is that everybody is going to criticize you. At least that day we didn’t have any.”

Postlewaite said that five years ago, most parents followed fixed rules about family biking: wait until the child turns one and can wear a helmet, then put him in a bike seat behind you. But since then, he said, many have discovered alternatives.

The family biking blog Totcycle, which Postlewaite described as the authority on the subject, spells out the merits and minuses of front child seats, back child seats, trailers, tandems and other family biking setups. It' s also a forum for parents to discuss their qualms about safety, show off their new cargo bikes and advocate for policies that favor family cycling. 

Reservations about putting babies on board
Totcycle bloggers recommend set-ups for different ages in a blog post titled “Family Biking Ages & Stages.” But the section about putting infants on bikes had become “so convoluted” that it became a separate post. The author wrote that she agonized before putting her seven-week-old son in a car seat inside a trailer, adding that “most of the injury prevention crowd and cycling mainstream would say ‘no go’ to babies on bikes.”

Case in point, the Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute urges parents to wait until their children are at least one before putting them in a bike seat, trailer or other carrier. This is to avoid potential brain injury. To cover all bases, Totcycle links to the institute’s “Should You Take Your Baby Along?” page but dismisses the views as “alarmist.”

Risks versus rewards
Anton Tutter turned to the Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute for advice on safety and decided to wait until his daughter was two and a half years old before putting her on a bike with him—just to be cautious. 

Unfortunately, a few years after they started biking together, they were hit by a motor scooter on Somerville Avenue. No one was injured, but he said the crash made him and his wife rethink how to travel with their children, now four and six. They decided to take roundabout routes on quiet residential streets instead of straight shots on busy avenues, which was hard, he said.

Still, family biking has worked “extremely well” for his family, Tutter said. Now that the city has painted more bike lanes and sharrows, he said, Somerville streets are more suitable for family biking, and he's seeing more cargo and tandem bikes around. His family even braves Highland Avenue on a tandem bike to get to his daughter’s school in East Somerville. 

Like other family biking enthusiasts, Tutter doesn’t have any concrete rules about riding with young children. Just talk to other parents, he said.

“There are so many different solutions that families have chosen.”