So you want to get into cycle logistics…
Cargodale started in March 2020 with one bike hired at our own expense, volunteer riders, and a desire to help local businesses and vulnerable residents. At the end of 2020, we have three bikes covering 30 square miles of hilly West Yorkshire, a team of 15 riders, and we’re starting to take the next steps towards becoming a sustainable business. Here’s what we’ve learned from our first 9 months as a bike delivery service and a social enterprise.
E-cargo bikes are brilliant
Cargo bikes have been in existence for decades, but it’s only over the past few years that they’ve started to come equipped with electric assist technology. The difference this makes is huge. A cargo bike on its own weighs two or three times as much as a sporty road bike, but with e-assist, even with a decent load on board, it feels like you’re riding a featherweight carbon race machine and you’ve swapped legs with Chris Hoy. This means that cargo bikes aren’t just suited to London or Cambridge any more. They’ve gone from a “last mile” delivery solution to something with much more range and versatility.
E-assist makes delivery in hilly areas easy
E-bikes are expensive
There’s always a price to being an early adopter of new technology, and in the case of e-cargo bikes, it’s a hefty one. A delivery-ready e-cargo bike is around £4,000 to buy - comparable to a second hand van. There are other options: you can borrow one (we did this initially, thanks to Visit Calderdale) rent one (ours come from Manchester Bike Hire) or fit a non-assisted bike with an assist kit (still not cheap, but an option if you have a donor bike). Maintenance costs are a factor, too: e-bikes can wear out drivetrain parts quickly, and need specialist servicing. And then you have to find somewhere to store them. All of this adds up. But help may be at hand…
Riese & Muller’s Load 75 Vario is the most technologically advanced bike we’ve used, but at around £7k to buy, it’s also the most expensive…
Cargo bikes are attractive to grant funders
We initially set up Cargodale using one of our directors’ own funds, but we were able to expand the project to become a fully-fledged delivery service after we received a grant from the Department for Transport’s Emergency Active Travel Fund. Cargo bikes are environmentally friendly, don’t require a driving licence to operate, and are cheaper to insure than motor vehicles. This makes them ideal for uses beyond commercial deliveries, and suitable for sources of outside funding. Our bikes are also used for food bank runs, welfare visits, and other community activities.
Related to that last point, cargo bikes are also a lot of fun to ride, and we’ve been able to accomplish a lot of the early stages of the project by drawing on offers of assistance from enthusiastic local cyclists. Obviously, if you’re trying to run a commercial delivery service, you’ll need to start paying your riders (and we mean paying them properly - the world doesn’t need more Deliveroos). There are other examples of bike delivery services (like the brilliant Chorlton Bike Deliveries) which are changing over from using volunteers to paid employees. If you do use volunteers, rider training is still important and Bikeability-based techniques can help increase confidence in traffic.
Not all e-cargo bikes are equal
There’s a huge diversity of e-cargo bikes out there and they have different strengths and weaknesses. Our most-used bike is the mighty Riese & Müller Packster 80, the cargo bike equivalent of a Ford Transit - loads of capacity, but awkward for smaller riders due to its size and weight. Some bikes put security higher up the list, with lockable lidded boxes. There are also various different drive units out there, and cross-compatibility might be a consideration, if you want to make sure that you can always get your hands on a spare battery or charger. For longer rounds, dual-battery bikes are starting to appear. Try a few out before committing to one, if you can.
Raleigh’s cargo bikes feature lockable boxes for secure delivery
Bike delivery problems are delivery problems
On our journey so far, we’ve encountered some challenges that are fairly specific to cargo bikes. We’ve already mentioned the upfront cost, and the space they need for storage. Their usable range drops off with hills, heavy loads and cold weather (although we’re still getting 20-odd miles out of our bikes even on laden, hilly delivery runs). Cargo bikes ought to be able to take advantage of cycle infrastructure, but in the UK much of it just isn’t designed for anything other than occasional leisure use by standard cycles. Bad weather isn’t necessarily an issue, although riders need to dress a lot more warmly than they would on a regular bike.
When it comes to the stuff that really takes up time, it’s all remarkably banal. Setting up delivery rounds; finding addresses; staff welfare; allocating resources correctly - all of these are issues not just in bike delivery, but in the logistics industry as a whole. Searching for hard-to-find addresses is a more frequent problem than tired legs or rainy days, and the proportion of time we spend planning routes, developing procedures and managing deliveries is not that far off the amount of time we spend riding.
Judging from the amount of similar startups over lockdown, bike delivery is an idea whose time has come. It takes time to prove a concept and gain wider acceptance, but many of the challenges involved are the same ones faced by the rest of the logistics industry.
Delivery itself is also just one piece of a bigger jigsaw. Our next moves will focus on increasing business engagement and consolidation of deliveries, as there are big improvements to be made here, both in relation to what we’re doing and the industry as a whole. Hopefully in a few month’s time we’ll be able to update this post with more useful advice.
