It’s Time for Cities to Ditch Delivery Trucks—for Cargo Bikes

When you factor in the cost of fuel, insurance, and depreciation, plus parking fines and congestion charges, the cost-effectiveness calculation swings even further in cargo bikes' favor. This is where it gets more difficult.

There is a time penalty for traveling to and from a parcel depot on the city's outskirts and a cargo bike on the city's outskirts. Cargo bikes need to be brought to a centrally located micro- hub from which they can load up, deliver, and return multiple times throughout the day in order to be competitive. It is only by making lots of deliveries from them that the savings in transportation costs cover the additional expense of running the operation.

You need a lot of people around a distribution hub to make cargo bikes economical. Antoine Robichet, a co-author of the Paris paper and a PhD student at Gustave Eiffel University in France, said that rent tends to be the highest in that area. If you want to take all your parcels by bike, you'll have to pay a lot more.

Satellite hubs have been used to parking short articulated trucks and distribute parcels. In the Czech Republic, around a dozen logistics companies deliver thousands of parcels by cargo bike each month using shared micro-Hubs provided by the council, splitting the running costs between them.

It is hard to imagine a large company rolling out cargo bikes on a large scale. It is necessary to invest in the bikes, their maintenance, and the depots. Larger companies need to be able to route riders to reloading points throughout the day.

The software that exists is for vans that pick up at the beginning of the day and then do eight hours of delivery. Cargo bikes can only carry eight hours of deliveries, so the route needs to be more dynamic.

It costs more to train a cyclist than it does to drive them around the city. Because cargo bikes are heavier and wider than conventional bikes, riders need to be taught how to ride them.

Cargo bikes would be a lot more viable if we were in an ideal world and accounting for costs not just in terms of running a business but the environmental and social costs like CO 2 emissions and road safety. Delivery by vans is an established model that enables big firms to conduct deliveries cheaply because those things are not taxed.