Joke’s on you, we never undiscovered the handcart. Or horse carts. Or ox carts. Or four-wheeled carts used by hawkers. Or four-wheeled carts with a motorcycle embedded in it. Or a bicycle-drawn cart. Or a bicycle-pushed cart. Or a cart some insane dude frankensteined together with a diesel generator to make the buggy of doom.
Funny. I now want one. Idk why, I kind of never transport large stuff and if I do our cargo bike suits me well enough. But now I want a hand cart.
You can transport the cargo bike with it!
The site has a feed! That’s great :D
Rediscovering? I see people using hand carts of various sorts all the time. Thoug most without a sail, that is kinda cool.
Need to move 40 concrete blocks around my house to dispose of them? Wheelbarrow makes it only a tiring job rather than completely exhausting!
We have a detachable bike trailer (2 big wheels and a tiny one in the front), that we’re using as a handcart and/or stroller when taking short trips to the grocery store/supermarket. I can confirm it works well!
Extremely cool article. Only one point I disagree wih with
Many people assume that handcarts go on the road, with the cars, or on the cycling path. That’s not the case: you use it on the sidewalk.
Jean Merrill documented The Pushcart War about this exact allocation of road space. Push carts belong on the road, don’t let car propaganda tell you otherwise.
Caveat: i say this from a systems perspective that cart SHOULD be on the road. Not a personal safety perspective where one might want to take the sidewalk.
Safety is achieved through mutually assured destruction, stick a propane cylinder on the cart.
Just transporting my case of glass vials of Nitroglycerin like it’s the third act of a western film.
“rediscovering”!
when was it forgotten?
To quote the article:
There are still many human-powered carts in modern society: strollers, grocery carts, roller suitcases, and various utility and folding carts. However, these modern carts are to their predecessors what modern birds are to dinosaurs. They are small, often with very small wheels, and we use them for very short distances, usually inside buildings.
define “modern society”
many people around the world still use carts outside. Because of environmental/geographical conditions or personal choice or as work tools
I liked the linked site, i will be checking regularly through rss, which is apparently founded by the writer of the article from Belgium, now living in Barcelona. Unless he travelled a little that’s a very limited frame of reference. (Same goes for the rest of the team
above image was a cheeky reminder of that.
Wheels are too narrow and diameter is small. Would recommend replacing them
I love this. It’s really practical for a city. Though I’m wondering about the sail idea now on more rural roads. Roads turn this way and that, and the wind shifts. You’d need someone sitting in the thing orienting the sail. I wonder if you made it a little larger with a largish sail and you had a driver on roller blades and a sailor sitting in it catching the wind how fast could you get it going? Depends on the wind, I guess, but a boat probably has more friction in the water and sailboats go pretty fast.
Ooh, maybe you could add an outrigger, a pole that slides left and right with a wheel on either side, to keep it from tipping.
In the city, with wind funneling between tall buildings, the wind can be extremely variable and gusty. I doubt the practicality of that a lot of the time. It certainly caught my attention though.
Very cool article
