A couple of years ago, I helped start a bike bus in my suburban town in North Jersey. The pandemic was still raging, and we were all looking for ways to get our kids out of the house and on to their bikes so they could get a little physical activity before school.
One of the things that helped me get the bike bus started was an electric cargo bike. At the time, my kids were too small to ride the two-and-a-half miles to our school by themselves, so the cargo bike — a first-gen Flyer L885 with a rear-hub motor and a plethora of fun accessories (now renamed the Flyer Via Pro) — was an elegant solution to this problem. Now, three years later, they can ride their own bikes, but I still find myself using my cargo bike to lead our growing bike bus pack every Friday. And it’s replaced my car anytime I need to run a local errand. It’s my “daily driver.”
Ever since the pandemic, electric bike sales in the US have been on a rocket ship trajectory.
E-bikes tend to stir up a lot of passion — They’re too fast! Teens are riding them unsafely! Bike lanes are already too crowded! What about faulty batteries? — but their utility is unquestionable. Owners talk a lot about using their e-bikes in unique and creative ways. But the best use for an e-bike is to replace a car trip. And the data suggests that e-bike owners are doing exactly that.
The best type of e-bike for replacing car trips is the cargo bike. Sturdy, capable, and often able to haul lots of cargo or even multiple humans, electric cargo bikes are rewiring cities to adapt their infrastructure for more human-centric transportation. Parents are using them to take their kids to school, businesses for last-mile delivery, seniors to improve their mobility, and cities to replace traditional car- and truck-based services, like snow plows and garbage pickup. We’re even starting to see electric cargo bike share programs emerge as a solution for anyone who can’t afford one of their own.
And perhaps the most joyful application, cargo bikes are playing a central role in the global movement to encourage more kids to ride their bikes to school. These bike buses that are springing up in cities and towns across the world are exposing more people to the joys of electric cargo bikes as well as the need for better infrastructure, slower speed limits, and communities that are oriented around the smallest and most vulnerable among us.
There’s still a long way to go before electric bikes, and cargo bikes in particular, are seen as legitimate forms of transportation in the US. Europe has made a lot more progress in that regard. Cities need to build safer systems, like protected bike lanes and convenient bike parking, to encourage more people to ride. And that requires taking space away from cars, which is a politically fraught proposal. Governments need to ensure their citizens are protected from faulty batteries that have been known to catch fire. And drivers and cyclists alike need to give each other a little bit of grace and make room for new people in the community — especially children — so everyone feels welcome, included, and valued.
Cargo bikes won’t solve every problem we have. But they can certainly help make our communities more livable.
