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Welcome to Issue #1 of Cargobike Culture!
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Utrecht's missing cargobikes
You’re probably familiar with the sharing e-scooters and bicycles in cities around the world. But did you know in some cities, you can rent cargobikes too? And not some rickety old wooden victorian tricycle either. I’m talking about shiny Urban Arrows with electric assist and 70km+ ranges. They even have fixings for Maxi Cosi baby seats, so everyone can come with you.
They work much the same as other sharing vehicles; sign up for an account, find your local one, unlock it and go. Each bike has it’s own location in the neighbourhood and they have to be returned there. For the use you pay €6 per hour.
In Utrecht, and many Dutch cities, the bikes are provided by Cargoroo. There are currently over 100 Cargoroos around Utrecht, soon to be 150 by the end of 2023.
Except as I write this on the 1st January 2023, apart from some bikes in the ‘fancy’ neighborhoods in the west of Utrecht, there are no cargobikes in sight.
We have our own cargobike, (a beautiful Bakfiets.nl Cruiser called Audrey) but we still use Cargoroos when we need to be in 2 places at once. As it was last week, with Audrey at the swimming pool and me needing a Cargoroo to carry some lumber to my workshop 20 mins away.
I fired up the app and…. nothing. I thought it was a bug, so logged out, logged in, uninstalled and reinstalled. But no bikes appeared.
I checked the website and this banner appeared across the top of the homepage.
It said ‘To prevent damage to our Cargoroo bikes by fireworks we decided to remove part of our fleet in Amsterdam, Den Haag, Utrecht & Berlin from the streets between December 28th and January 2nd’.
To fully understand this rationale, you need to understand what happens around new years eve in the Netherlands.
A Dutch style new years eve
To say the Dutch enjoy fireworks is like saying the French are partial to wine and cheese. You’re dramatically understating the depth to which these colourful explosives have permeated the culture of the Netherlands.
I remember my first NYE here. We were staying in an AirBnb in a particularly excitable neighborhood. At midnight we peered through the blinds of our apartment windows totally overwhelmed. I'd never seen anything like it before.
Hundreds of otherwise normal, quiet, reserved nederlanders lighting boxes and boxes of fireworks off in the street. After 10 minutes, the rate hadn't slowed down and the street was blanketed in smoke. The next morning you could walk across Utrecht on the debris, never touching the ground.
So whilst most dutchies like fireworks, a few like to put fireworks in things and see what happens. Garbage cans are a local favourite, as are cars, of which 30 were burned out in Utrecht this year.
Flaming Cargoroos
So its easy to see that if you were running a company who’s main assets lived on the street unguarded 24/7, you might be a little nervous over the new years period.
A brand new Urban Arrow at retail costs between €5500 and €6500 depending on the spec. What Cargoroo pay for them I don’t know. But I do know they are fitted with GPS trackers and customised batteries which add to the cost.
That’s a potentially big loss from one misplaced firework. But it’s also a big job to move 100+ cargobikes. Ton from Cargroroo was kind enough to answer some of my questions and let me know that the team move all the Cargobikes in a single day. And at the end of the festivities it takes another full day to replace them.
And where do you store them? An Urban Arrow is 258cm (101 inches) long and 70cm (27 inches) wide. And they weight at least 48kg (100lbs). Where are you going to put a 100 of them for 5 days? Ton told me that they rely on partnerships with local venues and schools to store the bikes.
The impact
Utrecht is rightly held up as a leading example for urban mobility and car reduction policies.
Utrecht wants people to ditch their cars. To do that successfully, people need to be given options, be it good public transport, shared car schemes or other mobility solutions including Cargoroo. A big factor in people making this switch away from personal cars, alongside cost, convenience and environmental concerns is trust.
People need to trust that there’ll be a shared car available when they need it. They need to trust that the bus to get them to work will arrive. And they need to trust that a nearby cargobike they normally rely on is ready to go.
Building the trust initially might be the easy part. Last year Utrecht city council gave hundreds of local residents a €40 voucher to try shared mobility services, including Cargoroo. This encouraged a lot of people try the new bikes out.
After a few successful trips, people begin the trust the idea, and crucially, begin to factor it into their day-to-day planning. Before long, the new Cargoroo becomes the way you get your kids to swimming lessons, your picnic to the park or shopping from the supermarket. Trust established.
Keeping the trust then, is key. For as trust is so easy to break, companies need to really work hard on their customer experience so people don’t face nasty surprises.
By taking the bikes away overnight, with no warning apart from a banner on the homepage, the trust was broken for a lot of people. And I don’t think it takes a lot of those experiences for people to loose trust in the entire project. Whether it’s turning up to a shared electric car to find an empty battery, or the bus which never turns up. How many chances do we have to change peoples habits before they pick up their car keys?
In the Cargoroo example, perhaps they could of actively notified users about the upcoming removal so people could plan alternatives. Or maybe storing some in publicly accessible, but supervised locations. Instead this year, people were met with an empty map with no bikes, and a message they had to go hunting for on the homepage.
Wrap up
I don’t think anyone, even the most fanatical Cargoroo customer would disagree with protecting the bikes from damage. The Dutch understand what happens around new years eve. And it’s this understanding which Cargoroo relys on. As Ton said:
“As the annual fireworks for now is part of “tradition” in most cities [where] we’re active, our users understand our pro active approach removing [our cargobikes] from the street. It minimises the impact, and [is] less impact than replacing a vandalised bike.”
I hope next year, we can find a way to protect the bikes, and peoples trust too.
Cargobike of the week
This year, Philip Marciniak from Saanich, a town on Vancouver Island in British Columbia created a second version of a snow plough for his cargobike. According to this piece from CBC, he's not intending to compete with the cities snow ploughs, but wanted to get himself to the vietnamese restaurant in the snow storm.
Check out the video of how he made it here:
Other things of interest
Interview with DOCKR co-founder
Tom Parr, one of the lovely folks over at the International Cargobike Festival recently published an interview with a company I see a lot around Utrecht. DOCKR provide businesses with a subscription cargo bike service. For €250 a month, businesses can lease an Urban Arrow with a 400 liter cargo box. The price includes insurance, maintance and roadside assistance.
There’s some interesting points in the interview, including some widely felt frustrations with the current confusing state of regulations in europe for cargobikes.
Read is here.
An overview of London’s cycling progress
I lived in London around 2011 and cycled everyday across the centre. I always likened it to a contact sport, but it looks so much better now! Tom Babin is a Canadian author and Youtuber who recently published this really concise video showing how far London has come when it comes to cycling.
A Birmingham family replace the car with a cargobike
A really lovely video about a family from the UK who sold their car and replaced it with a longtail Tern cargobike and a car club membership.
Our next issue
I’m aiming to have the next issue published on Friday 20th January 2023.
Next time, I’ll be talking to the most important cargo in a cargobike, the children! We’ll be finding all about what they like (and disklike) about their cargobike rides.