Lessons from the London Cargobike Summit
A quick summary of the 2023 National Cargobike Summit in London
Hello everyone,
Welcome to Issue #12 of Cargobike Culture!
I got back from London on Saturday night after a very busy few days at the cargobike conference. It was great and really worth going, so thanks to everyone who contributed to the trip fund.
I met a few newsletter subscribers there too (Hi Matt, Saskia, Ali, Karen and Tim!). It was great to meet you all in person. And if you’re a new subscriber from the conference or the festival, hello and welcome! Be sure to take a look through the archive.
I’ve gathered a few thoughts from the conference below, but expect some more in-depth analysis in the coming weeks.
Three takeaways from the National Cargobike Summit
For a two day event, the organisers of the conference packed so much in. I’ve got pages and pages of notes from the talks, and I haven’t had time to really unpack what I learnt. But, I do have three themes which I took away:
1) Theres a lot of money, people and effort being invested into cargobikes in the UK
I hadn’t really known what to expect from the day, having never been to a cargobike conference before. But the amount of British companies getting involved in the cargobike revolution was staggering.
Delivery companies (who might be the most obvious cargobike users) were there en mass. And as well as the London based companies, it was great to hear talks by some smaller firms from Oxford, Bury St Edmunds, Macclesfield and even the Isle of Wight.
But the delivery companies were just one group. There were also large companies like HHS tool hire talking about how they adopted cargobikes to deliver equipment to customers around the city. There were consultancies talking about the work they’ve done to advise businesses thinking of using cargobikes. There was an economist who had broken down the real-world costs of cargobike deliveries vs vans (that one was super interesting and will be it’s own newsletter in a few weeks). There were academics who had done work around cargobike use. And there were representatives from local and national government.
There really seems to be a ground swell of energy pushing cargobikes in the UK. Which leads me too my second theme….
2) The cargobike industry wants to be taken seriously
Will Norman who is the London Walking and Cycling Commissioner spoke at the conference. He said that 5 years ago, we wouldn’t have been able to fill the large hall we were in for a cargobike summit.
And I think he was right. It wasn’t long ago that cargobikes were a niche thing, a bit of a novelty perhaps. At the conference, Will also launched Transport for London’s cargobike action plan, another sign that cargobikes now being taken more seriously, at least in London.
And theres a lot which comes along with ‘being taken seriously’, like regulation, training, insurance and employment rights. All of which were covered at the conference too. There were a few moments on stage where speakers explicitly said that they wanted cargobikes to be taken seriously by industry, and that they’re not longer a niche form of transport. If there was a time for it, it’s now.
3) It’s business, business, business
I was perhaps a little naive in thinking that a commercial cargobike conference, mostly paid for by commercial sponsors, wouldn’t just be about business. But it was. And I don’t think thats necessarily a bad thing for all the reasons listed above and more. But I would have liked to have a bit more on the individuals/families use of cargobikes.
Whilst a lot of the talk was about reducing operating and fuel costs, company emissions and driver turnover, I think there are equally important stories to tell about families switching to cargobikes to replace or supplement car travel. Perhaps this wasn’t the audience for those stories, I’m not sure.
The festival day however, was all about families. Whilst the Friday was a conference, the Saturday was a festival hosted outside the Guildhall where lots of families came to try out some cargobikes for themselves. I spoke to a few of them to find out more about their stories, of which I will tell you all about next week!
Cargobike of the week
This issue’s cargobike of the week is a bike from our local park in Utrecht, and features a tiny Dutch child on a tiny Dutch bakfiets.
Our park has a host of trikes and bikes for the kids to use. My daughter prefers this penny fathering-eqsue model (below), and much to my disappointment repeatedly eschews the bakfiets.
The bikes are made by the Denmark based Winther and the cargobike is called the ‘Kangaroo’.
Other links of interest
Firstly, a new favourite newsletter of mine called Distilled. It’s a climate change newsletter by Michael Thomas and I really like his writing. AND he did a lovely post on how cycling became so well adopted here in the Netherlands. If you’re not familiar with the story, take a read.
A few weeks ago, we looked at a brief history of cargobikes and this week I stumbled across this great excerpt Hannah posted on Twitter. It’s from a 1961 issue of a cycling magazine and talks about how cargobikes were used in London at the start of the 1900s.
It was particularly interesting to read after spending an entire day in London learning how so many businesses are developing their cargobike delivery operations. Like so many things, it seems we’re just reinventing what went before us.
And finally, I loved this tweet by Laura Davis where she explained to the above mentioned Michael Thomas all the things she can haul in her beloved bakfiets.
That’s it for this week. See you next Friday!