The Cargobike Culture newsletter returns!

Season two of the world's favourite cargobike newsletter starts now!

After an unscheduled two year hiatus, Cargobike Culture is pleased to be back in your inbox (Don’t want to receive these emails anymore? The unsubscribe button is at the bottom of this page).

Our last newsletter landed in your inboxes in 2024. What’s been happening since then? Well, lots, but i’ll try and catch you up on some of the cargobike specific stuff:

• Babboe’s bikes fell apart and a criminal investigation was launched over a potential cover up*

• Carqon’s bikes also fell apart.

• Vogue’s bikes fell apart too.

Maybe cheap cargobikes aren’t actually a good buy, something we wrote about back in 2023. Luckily, some new standards for cargobike safety in the form of EN 17860 were published to stop people building bikes which fall apart.

*(though that investigation was closed after Babboe played nicely with the Dutch consumer regulator). I’m going to write a full newsletter about the Babboe story because it’s wild.

In more positive news, Urban Arrows haven’t been falling apart! They even (sort of) redesigned the Family model and found some new paint colours.

I also spotted my first Trek Fetch 4 in the wild last week. I don’t think it’s proved very popular, at least here in the Netherlands. First the launch price was over €7000 (though now it’s listed at €5k), and also the weight was a staggering 75kg (165lbs). A bike designer I spoke to at the time wondered how they’d managed to make a bike weigh so much. For comparison, an Urban Arrow tops the scales at 50kg (110lbs).

But what I noticed first was the state of that paint job. Ouch! I’ve seen 15+ year old Bakfiets that haven’t looked this bad.

Yikes. Utility bikes, need utility level paint.

Newsletter news

We’re back on a weekly schedule, with cargobike news arriving in your inboxes every Friday morning.

And what’s coming up? Well in what we’ll call Season One of Cargobike Culture, we spoke to a lot of people using cargobikes for their businesses and home lives. We heard from people carrying all sorts of things on cargobikes, like eggs:

How to balance 1000 eggs on 2 wheels

and dogs:

The specialised cargobike used by an Amsterdam dog walking company🐕

and even babies:

Babies in bakfiets

So the next writing project is going to be to catchup with them, and see how things panned out.

I’m also writing a long form piece on the Babboe debacle, and doing a deep dive into the manufacturing process for a cargobike. I’ve also got an idea to buy an old Babboe, and an old Bakfiets and chop them in half to see what the inside steel looks like after 10 years of Dutch climate.

There’s no shortage of topic ideas, and now in the last quarter of 2025, I’ve a little more free time and headspace to write about them.

News from the cargobike world

Everyone’s favourite cargobike festival returns

On October 13th and 14th, the International Cargobike Festival is returning to Utrecht. Like last year, there’ll be a host of exhibitors, speakers and a test track to try out a whole range of bikes. And it’s free!

This year the focus is B2B and you can see the current exhibitors list on the website. Are you coming? Let me know! Can’t make it? I’ll let you know what happened afterwards.

London’s cargobikes keep increasing

I loved this video from Fully Charged about the latest mass cargobike ride through London. It’s lovely to see some familiar faces like Cycling Sparks still on the road.

Also, did you see Fully Charged and some of their cargobikes in the recent Netflix series Hostage?

Honestly, one of the best parts of that show.

How comfortable are cargobikes for kids?

Finally, I want to let you know about this research study some students from TU Delft did to understand what the experience is like for kids in cargobike boxes.

In my day job, I help designers understand the experience that the users of their products and services have, so this research really struck a cord with me.

We’ll be back in your inboxes next Friday, thanks for reading!