JoshuaFalken

I own several bike trailers, built a few cargo trailers myself, and ride with them a few times a week, so I'm going to chime in with some thoughts after looking at their Vimeo page, which inexplicably has more information than their website.

The Convoy appears to be a standard bike rack built atop an electric unicycle. I say this to illustrate that it's offering maybe 30% more carrying space than you could reasonably get with a rack over the rear wheel of the bike.

The most striking thing to me is the use of a 14" wheel, yet the cargo area is the same height as a rack on the bike. If it was a bit longer, the centre of gravity could be lowered quite a bit. Though the compact nature could be useful to people with tight space limitations, I can't help thinking a long tail bike would be more versatile.

12kg weight for 50kg of cargo capacity isn't too bad, though my most used cargo trailer weighs 22.5kg with about ten fold the carrying capacity. It's much longer though, bit over five feet. Storing something this long isn't problematic for me though - my next one may be longer.

For a trailer that attaches to the axel, I like the connection design they've used (similar to the Burley Coho XC) and the tensioner being simple and effective for applying pressure on the powered wheel. It is also a stylish addition to a bike, which can be important.

The self steering aspect is quite interesting to me, though I'm not really sure it is needed for something with one wheel. The wheel does need to steer, given the trailer does not have any articulation from the bike, but why it has active steering is something I don't understand. It'd be interesting to know if they tried a passive steer solution that didn't work since the wheel is so close to the bike or something like that.

Unfortunately I have little confidence there is a niche for a product like this as I believe the dentists are buying Urban Arrows.

Based solely on your comment, I'm looking forward to watching a scene where Christian Bale goes around Wall Street collecting mugs in The Big Short 2: Polymer Boogaloo.

Thank you. I did think about that also.

'Volunteers' did the counting, but surely they should have known or been informed that a quorum of votes equal to x% of the community are required for the vote to be valid. If the count doesn't meet or exceed that value, discard the ballots.

Or even why was the vote permitted to take place in less than the required notification period? I presume the answer to these questions is either incompetence or bravado on the part of the board members taking their position for granted.

I find it unlikely that if the vote had went the other way, the board would have had the integrity to raise the same objections.

To play devil's advocate for a moment, having a sufficient vote notification period is important.

Though if that were the board's true concern, they surely would have announced intention to notify the community alongside their statement cancelling the vote for this reason, which hasn't happened insofar as I can tell.

I think that if half of the community shows up with less than a day's notice to make themselves heard, that's probably representative enough for how the community feels about these board members.

I found an update about the vote to remove the three board members.

Homeowners voted 190 to 20 in favour of removal, however the board cancelled the vote claiming there wasn't a 24 hour notice given to the community and subsequently that 210 votes might not qualify a quorum of more than a thousand homes.

You won't live near cities that clean up their waterways? You could rival Michelin publishing that list of reasons you have.

Imagine the power of combining this tosser initiative with the revenue sharing aspect of New York's vehicle idling program. Save the planet and get paid all at the same time.

I'm not sure the builder profits much more by using engineered timber given its expense compared to concrete. Given the environmental cost of building with concrete, it's important to find alternative materials.

Even in your anecdote, it's not as though the addition of a single floor was the cause of the fire, just like the material type wasn't. It's much easier for an incomplete building to go up in flames than a completed and occupied one.

Technology isn't always a solution, but it's not like pressurized stairwells, automatic hallway segmentation, or even sprinkler systems are things of science fiction. These are all pretty established techniques of fire control.

In terms of prevention, given the number one cause of fires in homes and buildings is in the kitchen, the easiest solution is opting out of the methane infrastructure in new projects. Though there's a rather large industry that pushes for this practice to continue, so that's a difficult thing to do.

Also, to bring it back to the topic relevant to this post, I'm not advocating to make escape harder in a burning building by eliminating stairwells. My point is precisely what's in the content of the post - single stairwell buildings in other areas don't have people on the upper floors dying hand over foot because they had to descend an extra flight or two.

If it was harder, I'm sure we would have heard about the trend of every building seven levels and up having dead bodies pile up in the stairwell after someone tried to flambé a quail.

While it isn't clinical, I think the practice of building beyond a few levels with a single egress point in so many other countries is sufficient enough evidence to justify changing this building standard.

The multiple references to 'fire safety organizations' read to me like 'fire departments'. Fire departments across North America already dictate what our roads (and therefore cities) look like. Seems like a logical leap they would also impose control over the corridors within buildings too.

I've seen some of the photos of people driving American-sized pickup trucks around Europe and I hope they get outlawed. Unfortunately, Europe and Asia do have so many more options - sometimes even by American companies much to my annoyance.

I occasionally look into getting a Kei car of some sort. Though it's not really practical for me. Maybe one day, by the time a sub five inch flagship phone is developed perhaps.