REAL MAGIC: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN COCA-COLA MOVES TO E-CARGO BIKES

BY EYAL SANTO

Using e-cargo bikes to cut delivery trucks VMT (vehicle miles traveled) in Tel Aviv: How can Coca-Cola franchisee in Israel, the Central Corporation for Beverages (CCB) save up to 80% of VMT by moving only 20% of its business to Cycle Logistics.

Tel Aviv is a perfect place for cycle logistics. It has great beaches and sunny weather, with more than 330 sunny days every year. It is a flat city with a compact topology—21 square miles with a population density of just over 23,000 people per square mile (roughly the same density as New York City, twice as much as Miami). It is home to almost 500,000 people, with 3 million in the greater metropolitan area. Tel Aviv’s GDP of $150 billion a year represents 40% of Israel’s GDP. By 2030, Tel Aviv will boast 400 miles of profound cycling infrastructure, mostly separated.

In 2019, we planned the cycle logistics pilot for Tel Aviv along similar lines to KoMoDo, a previously held successful pilot in Berlin. The city allocated a lot for five delivery companies, among them UPS and DHL, some 3 miles from the city center, where their vans handed parcels over to cargo bikes, which continued to deliver them within the city center.

We recruited the big companies—DHL, FedEx, UPS, Israel Post, Shufersal (Israel’s Walmart), and CCB, the Coca-Cola franchisee in Israel. The Ministry of Transportation hampered our pilot in Tel Aviv due to a lack of regulation. However, with CCB, we built a model whereby moving only 20% of their daily distribution in Tel Aviv to e-cargo bikes, they can cut truck VMT (vehicle miles traveled) in Tel Aviv by up to 80%. This model is yet to be validated in practice once regulation in Israel allows the use of e-cargo bikes.

Daily Delivery by Trucks

CCB uses a 7.5-ton diesel truck as its major delivery truck for core urban cores. Every day,

50 trucks haul almost 400 tons of drinks into Tel Aviv. While 80% of the tonnage goes to 20% of the locations—the big supermarkets, major outlets, etc.—the remaining 20% of tonnage creates 80% of the VMT. Those deliveries go to the local grocery stores, cafés, bars, and restaurants. This is where CCB needed help. They were willing to give a 10%-20% discount if they could dump all merchandise in one place and hand the responsibility to the business owners to schlep the last mile. CCB records show that, on average, a delivery truck drives in Tel Aviv close to 19 miles, not including from the depot to the city or the other way around.

Total truck daily VMT in Tel Aviv is 930 miles just for the CCB trucks, out of which 80%, almost 750 miles, could be saved if avoiding doorstep delivery to the small businesses. Each truck pollutes over 20 pounds of CO2 per day, with the entire fleet polluting more than 1,000 pounds of CO2. Regarding NoX particle emissions, each truck generates almost 30 pounds of particle pollutants, with a total fleet per day running almost 1,500 pounds of particle emissions.

The cost of the daily goods delivered to the small businesses is about $300,000. Truck maintenance costs are about 80 cents per mile. The total daily maintenance cost due to redundant VMT accumulation is around $600. Daily cost of redundant men hours run around $6,000. With today’s increasing diesel costs, 60-65 gallons a day costs today in Israel about $500. And the total operating cost for 50 trucks is just over $7,000 a day.

Distribution by E-Cargo Bikes

Looking at e-cargo bikes, there is the challenge of distributing 75 tons daily. A fleet of 80 carrier cycles is needed to replace 50 diesel trucks. We built a solution of 55 pairs of Long Johns (the two-wheeled cargo bikes), each one of them able to carry about 250 pounds, and 25 back-loader tricycles, each carrying around 500 pounds.

We carefully examined all the trucks’ routes in the city, the locations of CCB customers, and the micro-hub’s suggested locations, and we concluded that changing from trucks to cargo bikes is indeed sustainable— environmentally, of course, but also economically.

Daily operating of the cargo bike fleet was calculated to be $24,000, about 8% of the total daily goods value. Taking off $7,000 of the trucks’ cost of operation, the total cost of operating the cargo bike fleet to deliver 20% of the tonnage to the small locations is $17,000, or 5.7% of the total daily goods value delivered to those places. Adding real estate prices for micro-hubs, it is assumed to add another $17,000, doubling daily costs to $34,000. But again, this is only 11.4% of the total value of daily goods—far away from the up to 20% discount that CCB was willing to give.

What are the savings and benefits for the city? Each year, 180,000 miles of heavy trucks VMT in the crowded streets of Tel Aviv. CO2 emissions can be cut annually by over

100 tons. NoX particulate emissions are cut annually by almost 150 tons while creating safer streets and hundreds of jobs for cargo bike riders.

Now, mind you, this is only one city and one vendor. Counting more than 3,000 cities in the world with a population of more than 100,000—assuming Tel Aviv is an average city somewhere in the middle and assuming only 100 vendors are delivering to a city— what happens if we apply this use case to more cities?

Worldwide, if we apply this to 3,000 cities, we can cut VMT in our city streets by 5.5 billion miles every year. We can cut our CO2 emissions by 3.1 million tons. We can cut our NoX pollutant particle emissions by 4.4 million tons annually. We can save hundreds of thousands of human lives, not just from crashes and collisions with trucks but also from air pollution and sedentary lifestyles, and we can create millions of new jobs.

So, what are we waiting for? Let’s ride.

Eyal Santo

Founder & CEO, Umo - Urban Mobility Cargo Bikes Tel Aviv, Israel

An urbanist, entrepreneur, and avid cyclist—for sport and for transport—Eyal Santo is a physicist by education who served 20 years in Israeli hi-tech. Traveling to the world’s leading bicycle cities, Santo has worked for 15 years on connecting cities and bicycles. Serving with the Tel Aviv strategic planning unit and with Tel Aviv DOT, he took part in developing the Tel Aviv strategic plan for bicycle and micromobility and headed the city’s bicycle pilot projects. Since 2021, he has been focused on Tactical Urbanism and Cycle Logistics.