Urban Mobility: Bicycles, E-Cargo Bikes & the City

URBAN MOBILITY: BICYCLES, E-CARGO BIKES AND THE CITY

BY EYAL SANTO

How bicycles and e-cargo bikes impact our cities.

Imagine the day when we’re all rewarded for leaving our cars at home and travel to work, school, or errands using our bicycles; the day our employers incentivize us to commute using active transport: walking, cycling, riding public transit; the day when our local businesses are encouraged to switch from using dangerous and polluting delivery vans and trucks to clean, quiet e-cargo bikes. Imagine the impact all this would have on our emissions, pollution, noise, collisions, and casualties, on our urban life quality, and, essentially, on our very own health and wellness. So, it is time to decide: Which city do we want?

The world’s most successful cities are ones whose elected officials and executive management realized flipping the transport hierarchy pyramid is the key: Pedestrians come first. A city should be a city for people, not cars.

Cyclists come second. And to avoid creating conflicts between pedestrians and cyclists, make sure no cycling on sidewalks and offer a continuous network for bike lanes segregated from traffic where needed and shared with vehicle traffic on traffic-calm streets.

Public transit comes after cyclists: robust service, efficient and effective, to all parts of town, reliable and frequent with a continuous network of dedicated bus-only lanes. The easiest way to move people from cars onto public transit is to build easy access to sheltered bus stops and build reliable service where riders do not need to mind the timetable. It always excites me to quote

Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogotá, who built one of the most robust and profound mass transit systems in the world: “If we are all equal in front of the law, then we must accept that a bus carrying 100 passengers has 100 times more right of the way than a car carrying a single passenger.

Let’s look at bikenomics, the economics of the bicycle system. In every city where car lanes have been removed for bike lanes, local businesses along the way have thrived. The more bike infrastructure, the better bike culture is formed, and more people will switch to biking. Our urban quality of life will improve. And our urban society will be healthier and happier.

Car dependence comes with a price. It does not only end with more than $9,000 annually for car maintenance and ownership; it continues by increasing our cost of living through parking requirements and wrongful zoning codes that fuel our housing prices.

Imagine what could happen when a city reduces car ownership by only 15,000 cars. This is exactly what happened in DC from 2005 to 2009: the population increased by almost 16,000 people, but car registration went down by 15,000 vehicles.

Living and working in a bikeable city has value beyond personal convenience. It also allows more money to stay closer to home, fueling the local economy instead of inflating deep pockets far away.

In Copenhagen, Lund University researchers concluded that for each kilometer cycled instead of using a car in the city, the profit for urban society is 31 euro cents from 15 euro cents loss in cars up to 16 euro cents gained in cycling. The Danish Minister of Health also concluded that for every kilometer cycled,

Shanghai, China

© ALAIN DELORM

Copenhagen, Denmark Copenhagen, Denmark

Copenhagen is an excellent example of a cycling city. In 2019, there were five times more bicycles than cars.

The Netherlands

© TOLKAMP METAAL SPECIALS

Berlin, Germany

Eyal Santo

Founder & CEO, Umo – Urban Mobility

Tel Aviv, Israel

An urbanist, entrepreneur, and avid cyclist, Eyal Santo is a physicist by education who served 20 years in Israeli hi-tech. Traveling to the world’s leading bicycle cities from 2010-2015, he became an urban consultant in 2015, advising Israeli cities on cycling infrastructure, culture, and bikenomics. In 2017, he established Umo – Urban Mobility, a technology startup developing AI solutions to help cities save billions of dollars by incentivizing and rewarding people for adopting more sustainable lifestyles.

instead of driving a car in the city, the health benefits alone are worth almost 1 euro, 90 cents per kilometer.

Cyclists are also proven to be better shoppers. It might be that bikes don’t carry as much as the car, so they shop less per visit, but that changes with e-cargo bikes. It was not long before businesses recognized the potential of cycling customers. In Melbourne, a study found that a 145-square-foot parking spot can produce an average of $27 on shopping per hour by a single driver—or $97 an hour when it is turned into six bicycle parkings. The lesson has been learned in many cities. In Tel Aviv, we turned a single car spot into 12 bicycle spots using mobile bicycle parkers.

And with that, we’re turning the chapter to discuss urban cycle logistics. Think about replacing dangerous and polluting delivery vans and trucks with clean, quiet e-cargo bikes or carrier cycles, which can carry hundreds of kilograms. Existing distribution models where each vendor supplies separately, each business causes lots of trucks to drive on our streets while at the same time being far from optimizing load capacity.

For example, the European Cycle Logistics Federation found that a 3-ton van is typically loaded with only 130 kilograms. In a distribution model based on carrier cycles, trucks from huge traditional logistic centers do not drive into town. Instead, they haul the goods to microhubs at the edge of the city from where the carrier cycles distribute the goods.

One of the immediate impacts of moving to carrier cycle logistics is a huge drop in VMT (vehicle miles traveled) by heavy trucks. City Changer Cargo Bikes, the EU project coordinator for cargo bikes, found that cargo bikes can answer 77% of families school runs, errands and shopping; 50% of service by handymen, street cleaners, plumbers, carpenters, public workers; and 32% of all good deliveries in town, products, parcel, etc., allowing small businesses not only to survive but to thrive by doing home deliveries.

Cities can also harness the power of e-cargo bikes for street cleaners, road maintenance, etc. Carrier cyclists or rickshaw taxis lower congestion and get people faster across town.

In Groningen, Netherlands, PostNL distributes all mail and parcels using carrier cycles, collaborating with service provider startup Dropper. Copenhagen collaborates with the CCCB, the City Changer Cargo Bike, to help refugee women to start their own cargo bikes-based flower business. In San Sebastian, Spain, Cycling Without Age is a heartwarming operation where volunteers on cargo bikes take elderly people to cycle in the sun, breathe fresh air, and feel the breeze in their hair.

In Strasbourg, France, the municipality uses e-cargo bikes for public works, road safety, and mobile libraries catering to disabled people. In Manchester, UK, the rebalancing of the city bike share is done in a sustainable manner using carrier cycles. New York City also launched an e-cargo bike pilot for home deliveries where Amazon is a major player.

In Berlin, the KoMoDo pilot succeeded in flying colors: Five courier companies ditched their delivery vans and serviced the city center by e-cargo bikes, erecting a tactical micro-hub just three miles north of the city on a lot allocated for the project. In Tel Aviv, we did a cargo bike pilot along similar lines in three micro-hubs on the edges of the city. We recruited Post IL, FedEx, DHL, UPS, and Israel’s largest supermarket chain.

Carrier cycles are far more environmentally friendly than electric vehicles, as the effects show manufacturing an electric van is 50% more polluting than a similar model by diesel. An e-cargo bike is more efficient than any other means of hauling.

Today, last-mile logistics are being packed into micro-containers using standard crates and pallets. Containers in international freights are arranged in a bulk manner. In last-mile logistics, optimization is essential. Enter the physical internet. The same way an internet bid is broken into smaller packets to be sent over and then reassembled, the physical internet arranges the parcels into micro-containers that maximize space in a last-in, first-out manner.

In the last few years, e-cargo bike manufacturers have wanted to go higher on the value chain, so they’ve diversified their operations by offering more than bikes. Veloce was the first to stop selling its squad carrier cycles and instead manufacture e-cargo bikes to operate micro-hubs and delivery services throughout the Nordic countries.

So, we should never stop dreaming, but at the same time, we should strive to make our dreams come true. As said by the great urban planner Fred Kent, “If you plan a city for cars and traffic, you get cars and traffic. And if you plan a city for people and places, you get people and places.”