First Hands-On Training Session

 Hats off to Joanne Foote for braving through our first actual hands-on training session with Klare!  We were having so much fun that I completely forgot to take any pictures.

Being a gorgeous (if slightly cool) afternoon and a wet and windy forecast for the weekend, I was keen on getting some tread time in before the end of the month.  Fortunately Joanne's scheduled opened up and the stars aligned for us to spend an hour (or more?... don't really know where the time went but we had a great time) in the afternoon under sunny skies to go over the basics of the trishaw operations first and then a road trip.

I went through a checklist we plagiarized from Wisconsin and touched on all the basics of all the operative features of the trishaw from the mechanical parts to operating the electric assist and battery removal for remote charging.  Since lunch hour had just passed at the High School (Rick Hansen's) opposite my place we opted to take a short cut through their grounds to a park with paved paths (Fr. Angelos Saad Park) nearby.

I decided to ride first giving Joanne the opportunity to strap herself into the cab and use one of our gel foam cushions that make the sparse basic padding of the trishaw more comfortable.  As we rode around the back of the school there were a dozen kids playing basketball and Joanne, in her inimitable way invited them to join us on the ride.  Surprisingly, one enthusiastic student accepted her invitation and got into the seat beside her fumbling with the seatbelt.  It looked like he had never sat in an airplane seat since the latching mechanism is exactly the same as the airplane seatbelts.

While we navigated the tight space between the bollards we learned that this kid had his own blog with over 2000 followers and wanted to post our ride to his blog so started vlogging the ride while interviewing Joanne about the program.  We shared the CWAM app with him so that he could have my contact information to let me know when he had posted his review.  As we got into the park, I ceded the pilot cockpit to Joanne and took my place in Economy.  After readjusting the seatbelt (which let me know that I needed to lose a lot of winter flab) we headed off down the path between the playing fields towards the kids playground which gave Joanne a good feel for handling the trishaw around tight corners, down a steep slope and over a couple of curb cuts.  She handled every challenge like a pro.  We did a couple of rounds of the pathways, testing the turning radius as well as the ability to swing the back wheel of a loaded trishaw to turn around in a tight space instead of doing a 17 point turn.  

As we were heading back Joanne decided that we should incorporate some residential streets in our test ride so taking the chance that the baffle gates would be open onto Charminster Crescent (they were!) we headed out onto the open road.  Getting the hang of using the Walk Asssist to gently ease over the curb cuts is a skill to develop without cutting the assist level down to zero and then wondering why it suddenly got so hard to peddle!  Something to watch out for.  As we cruised around the corner towards Warwickshire Dr. I told Joanne to open it up to see how fast we could go.  She ramped up the assist level to 5 and geared down to 8 bringing the loaded trishaw almost to 20kph. Not something I would recommend unless I was absolutely confident of her skills.  We turned on to Warwickshire to hoots and cheers from onlookers when Joanne wondered out loud whether the trishaw would fit on the sidewalk.  I knew it would from previous experience but it gave Joanne another opportunity to do a diagonal transition from the road to a driveway to get onto the sidewalk after an ebike went whizzing down it!

It was not as bad as I envisioned but would be cautious about attempting the move with a load of fragile senior citizens since the unsprung trishaw tends to sway quite violently at assymetrical wheel transitions from roadway over curbcuts.  This is where the walk assist comes in handy if it wouldn't take so long to kick in (I swear is sometimes felt like more than 5 seconds although in reality it must have just been 3-4).  We rode about 30-40m on the sidewalk to the intersection and waited for traffic to pass before riding back down Dreamcrest home.  The transverse road cracks were uncomfortable when passed over at anything over 6kph and so Joanne refined her technique by aging me 20 years and it was a smooth ride back home.

All in all, a wonderful ride and the first training session of many under my belt.  Thank you Joanne.

Here is our Trishaw Checklist:

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Here is a copy of the checklist that Wisconsin BikeFed uses for their pilot training:

This is the pilot training checklist from Brockville:

Here is a copy of the Session log ride statistics from North Shore CWA in Vancouver