FollowMe Tandem Coupling
How do you teach your children the skills and values of everyday biking when they are too little to be safe in traffic on their own bikes, but getting too big and restless always to be passengers on yours?
We’ve had our eyes on the FollowMe tandem coupling for years as an answer to this question, and have finally succeeded in introducing it to North America from Switzerland.
The FollowMe lets you quickly hitch and unhitch your child’s bike to yours for safe, fun, and flexible family transport.
There are lots of reasons; whether it be tired legs, routes with too much traffic, or longer distances. Connect your bikes and pedal together to school in the morning rush, disconnect and lock her bike there, then ride your bike to work with the FollowMe stowed compactly behind you. After school, take the slow route home with her riding on her own.
Are you one of those families with more than one child? Unlike tag-along products that attach to your bike’s seatpost, the FollowMe allows a sibling to ride simultaneously in a child seat on your bike. FollowMe attaches at your axle, not interfering with your existing rack and pannier setup. Just as importantly, this low and stable attachment results in the most secure and neutral connection: a world apart from the often sketchy handling of seatpost-hitch designs.
See the Swiss manufacturer’s site for further information. Even if you don’t read German, ja, don’t miss the lab report comparing the FollowMe to competing products, complete with crash test dummies and charts and graphs demonstrating the comprehensive superiority of this design.
January 27th, 2010 at 11:44
Here is a machine translation of the lab report by Google’s translator.
http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.followme-tandem.com/images/pdf/test.pdf&sl=de&tl=en&hl=&ie=UTF-8
September 27th, 2010 at 18:38
[...] bikes, which can impact options down the line, though in researching this article, I did find this potentially fabulous contraption for hauling a child on his/her own bike and would still permit a [...]