Odd jobs on cargobikes

Plus a new Cannondale cargobike, uninsurable bakfiets and newsletter recs

Sep 01, 2023

Hello everyone and welcome to Issue #24 of Cargobike Culture!

It’s a chockablock newsletter today, so let’s get straight into it.

Handypeople on handy bikes

There’s a handyman* company in London who are now only working via cargobikes. Manmaid provide odd-job services to residents of west London bourghs Fulham, Hammersmith, Chelsea, Earl’s Court, Kensington, Putney and Battersea. And all via the power of their own legs (and a bit of battery help).

Like many companies doing the same, they’re seeing lots of benefits, including financial. Since switching to the cargobikes, the firm are saving £7000 a year in parking fees alone. Combine that with all the other costs of running a fleet of vans and the savings quickly add up.

The local council, who were publicising the company this week, also have a grant scheme where companies can claim £1000 towards a new cargobike.

The bikes themselves are Centaur Cargo Trike XLs. I hadn’t heard of Centaur Cargo before, but I had seen their bikes around. The reason is that they’re mostly sold under different retail brands, like Babboe Pro, or Raleigh in the UK. Accell group, who you might also of not heard of, owns all of those brands, plus Carqon, Koga and Sparta.

The bikes they use start at £6000 each, so a small fleet isn’t a minor investment for a small business. But the benefits are clearly paying off. Mungo, the company founder, said that they’re saving huge amounts of time not being stuck in traffic. Infact, he said that before he was ‘spending most of my time in the van’. And if you’re a self employed tradesperson, that’s not time you’re getting paid for.

And parking a van in London, especially the busy boroughs they’re working in, can be a job in itself. If you can find a parking spot, it’s probably not close to the customer’s house. So once you factor in the time transporting your tools and materials from the van to the property, being able to just park up outside the front door must save them hours.

For more examples of tradespeople on cargobikes, you can take a look at the @tradesonbikes Twitter account.

*No, I don’t love the term handyman either, but it’s what they call themselves. I looked for a better one. I found fixer, handy person or maintenance person. But I don’t think those terms quite capture what a handyman traditionally does. Maybe property maintenance company? I don’t know, words are hard.

Cannondale’s new cargobike

Today US bike maker Cannondale announced their first cargobikes and reader, I’m in love. Just look at this.

There are two new models. The Wonderwagon Neo (above) is a traditional bakfiets design and the Cargowagon Neo is a long tail model.

I’m going to tell you all the reasons why I love the Wonderwagon:

It looks AMAZING. I love the red accents, I love the box material choice, it’s perfect.
What a great name! Well done naming team.
It comes with a trailer mount already fitted.
Its got 2 ~~eyes~~ front lights.
Its got a dropper seat post so you can instantly change the height.
It’s got Garmin radar equipped which warns you if a car is hurtling towards you.
It’s got loads of extra storage compartments
It comes equipped for a dual-battery setup by default, which is normally a chargeable extra from other manufacturers. And they’re stored in a sensible place.

What I love most about this is that the product team clearly spent a lot of time designing something different. They’ve learnt from the competitors about what works, but they’ve innovated and are doing things their own way too. Like the dropper seat post, something straight from the mountain bike world where Cannondale is best known. I don’t think any cargobike has offered that before.

And I love the box design too. It’s high enough to give a sense of safety, but isn’t obstructing the view for the kids, or making them feel confined inside the bike. It looks great. And the low sides mean they can get in and out by themselves.

My only gripe is the price, which starts at €6500, and rises to €7500 for a bigger battery and the Enviolo Heavy Duty transmission. Like all new cargobikes, they’re not cheap. But I think you’re getting a lot more for your money compared to some of the competitors.

Bakfiets insurance woes

One of the biggest insurers in the Netherlands, ANWB, have been making it harded to get insurance for Urban Arrow cargobikes. As reported on consumer advice website Radar, the popular cargobikes are so prone to theft that unless you take insurance out via the dealer when you collect your new bike, they won’t insure you at all. And even then, they won’t insure the bike unless it’s fitted with a tracking device, something Urban Arrow only began to offer this year.

Interestingly, at the moment this only applies to cargobikes from Urban Arrow. Why are they so popular with thieves? I have a few ideas:

Its the most popular cargobike in the Netherlands, so there are more of them to steal.
They hold their value very well and sell quickly on the used market.
Being the most popular, there’s more of a market for spare parts which might make them easier to dismantle and sell off for parts.
They’re one of the few cargobike brands with international recognition, and a lot of thefts are the result of organised criminal gangs stealing for export.

It can be difficult to secure any cargobike against theft (which will be a newsletter topic in itself soon), but it looks like Urban Arrows are suffering more than the other brands. I wonder how the news has gone down over at Urban Arrow HQ…

2024’s International Cargobike Festival is coming up

It’s only a few months until the global cargobiking elite gather in Amsterdam for ICBF 2023. And this year, the organisers have partnered with Fully Charged Live Europe.

What’s the Fully Charged Live? Well you know that chap who played Kryten in Red Dwarf and then hosted Scrapheap Challenge? Well 13 years ago he, Robert Llewellyn, started a Youtube channel all about his love of electric cars. That grew and grew into a pretty substantial media and events company which is interested in anything electric, including cars, houses, boats, bikes etc.

So if you wouldn’t normally travel across the country/continent/world for a cargobike conference, maybe this time there’s enough going on to make the trip worth it.

Both events run Friday 24th to Sunday 26th November 2023 and take place at the RAI exhibition hall in Amsterdam. Tickets are €54 for all three days and grant entry to both events.

Newsletters I love and you might to

Recipe tips

This was a recommendation from another one of my favourite newsletters, The Department of Salad. It’s written by a very busy mum of two who is also a professional recipe designer. All the recipes are easy to follow, and if you subscribe there’s even an index page where you can see all the previous ones, organised into handy categories.

Another bicycle newsletter

My other recommendation is the newsletter from Amsterdam based, bicycle PR firm Twotone. Their weekly newsletter is written by owner Jon Woodroof and is always full of insightful and interesting snippets from the cycling industry, without the boring bits. He also reminds me that there are bikes other than cargobikes around. Shocking I know.

James is (still) running a marathon

Next April I’m running the London Marathon in aid of Mind. Mind is a mental health charity in the UK who do crucial work campaigning for healthcare services, whilst also offering direct help and support to those in need. As regular readers know, this is an issue close to my ~~head~~ heart and I’ve set an ambitious £2000 target.

If you’d like to donate to my efforts, you can do so on my JustGiving page.

Thanks for reading and see you next time!