Before I gave up my car I can remember thinking to myself, "Without a car, how will I carry things?"
How would I carry a 24 case of water home?
How would I carry all of my groceries home?
How would I carry my latest IKEA purchases home?
I soon discovered the answers...
Don't buy water in bottles, you've got a tap.
Don't buy all of your groceries at once, and stop buying heavy frozen junk.
Don't buy more stuff from IKEA, unless you're with a friend with a car.
Just because a bicycle doesn't come with trunk space it doesn't mean that we, as Torontonians, are left unable to take anything with us when we ride. Here then are some of the ways we carry stuff by bicycle in Toronto.
Sometimes we like to keep an eye on our stuff and use a basket mounted up front:
Sometimes we want to see the potholes ahead of us and mount a basket on the back:
Sometimes we like to carry more stuff, and have baskets both front and rear:
There are times where we like to improvise the type of baskets we use:
And then sometimes we fill our baskets with keytars in Accordion City:
To keep our stuff dry we sometimes use panniers that match our helmets:
Sometimes we rent trailers to carry even more stuff:
Sometimes we carry other people on our bikes:
Sometimes we improvise how we carry people on our bikes:
And then we sometimes like to carry our children on our bicycles:
Or we take the whole family on a four-wheeled bike while visiting Toronto Island:
And then sometimes we have a really big family, but we still travel by bike (click for larger version):
How do you carry your stuff on a bicycle in Toronto? Share your tips in the Biking Toronto Forum.
Photos via the Biking Toronto Flickr Pool and photographers in Toronto on Flickr