#Bicycle #maker #longer #fat #bikes #throw
You shouldn’t repair a broken fat bike. This is what bicycle maker Jeffrey Beekhoven from Amsterdam says. He is not the only bicycle mechanic who prefers to show fat bike owners the door. “You might as well throw it away if it’s broken.”
A fat bike is an electric bicycle with extra wide tires, which was originally intended as an alternative to a mountain bike. More and more young cyclists, especially young cyclists, are now riding fat bikes, which causes nuisance on cycle paths. At the end of last month, the outgoing cabinet announced that it plans to make possession and use of booster sets for electric bicycles on public roads a punishable offense. But this does not ban the fat bike.
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That bicycle has now conquered the Dutch streets, but bicycle makers are anything but happy about it. From a tour of NH News it appears that several bicycle makers in North Holland no longer want to repair fat bikes. They think electrically powered bicycles are too dangerous.
‘Quality is just not good’
Bicycle maker Beekhoven understands his colleagues. “The fat bike was put on the market a few years ago, in very poor quality. Everything came via AliExpress or Alibaba. People ordered it and it came to the Netherlands, but the quality is just not good. There were no inner tubes, no outer tubes. We couldn’t actually do anything with that bike,” he says in Goedemorgen Nederland on NPO 1.
“That has only become worse, because more sales have occurred,” sighs Beekhoven. “Young riders aged twelve or thirteen were given such a bicycle and they also started to upgrade it. They were going faster than 25 kilometers per hour and that is of course not allowed. It creates dangerous situations.”
Missed good morning Netherlands? Watch this broadcast now here via NPO Start.
The police in the Netherlands recently introduced a special roller bank, which, in addition to scooters, also checks fat bikes and other electric bicycles. If it were up to Beekhoven, fat bike owners would no longer come to him. “If a part of this bicycle is broken, and it is often not just one part, it accumulates. There is now too much choice of Chinese parts. You can’t do anything with that.”
“You might as well throw it away if it’s broken,” says Beekhoven.
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Door: Peter Visser
