National attention for cargo bikes, Portland in Bicycling Magazine
Posted by Jonathan Maus (Publisher/Editor) on September 15th, 2011 at 9:36 am
cool is usually defined by racing bikes.
The October issue of Bicycling Magazine includes a big feature article on the cargo bike revolution that’s sweeping the country.
Portland, with our flourishing cargo bike scene, figures prominently into the article. There’s copy and photos devoted to a local bike move and mentions of local cargo bike shop Splendid Cycles, B-Line Sustainable Urban Delivery, custom cargo bike builders Metrofiets and fave bike-inspired hangout Hopworks Urban Brewery.
The story is titled, “Is this the Coolest Bike Ever Made?” and the cover teaser is “This Bike Will Save the World: Why Don’t You Have One?”
It’s great to see such a mainstream and wide-reaching magazine as Bicycling (with high-end, deep-dish carbon racing wheels just a few pages away) feature such a quality story about the potential of cargo bikes to transform America.
Since Clever Cycles introduced help popularize cargo bikes in Portland, they’ve had a huge impact on our city in many different ways. Lets hope this solid exposure leads to more cities going cargo crazy.
Perhaps you could change “hitting on all cylinders” to “spinning on all gears”. I feel it is a poor choice of car-centric words as it reminds me that there are vehicles other than bikes in this world and that makes my heart cry.
RecommendedI feel that it is ship-centric and that makes my heart laugh.
RecommendedDeeeebo,
thanks for the suggestion… it’s just a common phrase and i tend to not like cute bike-centric phrases like that. That said, I definitely hear your point!
RecommendedYour heart is too sensitive.
RecommendedDeeeebo,
RecommendedHave you ever read “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas”? You are the sad child who has to sit in the basement and soak up the negativity so that the rest of us can live well. Yes, some will walk away when they have to see the sad and decrepit state of misery that you live in, exemplified here by trying to un-organically change language in a most non-creative and boring way so that it can fit into your minority view for no reason other than it is a minority view (do you write woman as womynn?). Oh, also Daiya cheese does not taste anything like real cheese.
Well, let’s see what we hear and see from Interbike… “If cargo can make there, it can make it everywhere…”
RecommendedCongrats to Portlanders for some well-deserved coverage.
Especially Adam and Halley, who are Bike Move workhorses.
Check out Adam and Lance pulling a double trailer of my stuff at my bike move last April.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jqx9yYINbT8
Ted Buehler
RecommendedAnd I object to calling them ‘cargo’ bikes. Cargo being an obvious conjunction of the words ‘car’ and ‘go’. Hardly appropriate for something so cycling centric.
Recommendedum, hardly.
Look up cargo at Dictionary.com
Recommended“cargo – 1650s, from Sp. cargo “burden,” from cargar “to load, impose taxes,” from L.L. carricare “to load on a cart” (see charge). South Pacific cargo cult is from 1949.”
also
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo
Obvously a conspiracy! Look at how many times car is used in your own reference!
RecommendedMy heart has no more tears, but instead is listening to emo and contemplating ending it all.
Don’t do it heart! We can begin a cyclego movement.
Gosh I hope you are being facetious.
RecommendedThink of it as a contraction of “cars must go away.”
Recommendedthis reminds me of my idea for the “cargo bike industry” (is there such a cohesive group, yet?) to unite and develop a set of standards for making cargo bike *accessories*. like, you know, so you can have 3rd parties creating and selling accessories like platforms, buckets, dumptrucks, who knows! various standards: baksfeits standard set of sizes, front-end racks, etc.
kinda like back racks on bikes have a pretty standard fittings. sure sure there would be a lot to work out, but how fun?? a whole industry of people making attachable utility storage/carrying units, liquid tanks, food carts, people carriers, parade floats, who knows!?
RecommendedThat would be cool – basically the Windows ecosystem for cargo bikes, where there are standards that everyone can build to. On the other hand, I suspect that most builders would prefer to be Apple, selling proprietary products with a strong emphasis on style as a selling point and no real competition.
RecommendedI think we will get there once we have critical mass. One of my hopes is that we can integrate user research into it like big companies do for their race and touring bikes. Because cargo bike riders are all kinds of people – from novices to old road warriors! A group would be also nice to tackle the nasty monster of liability insurance…
RecommendedXtracycle has provided “open source” designs, which have successfully encouraged a few manufacturers to make compatible, modular products. They think like you do. I like these thoughts.
RecommendedI wish Bicycling Magazine placed this story on their website so that I could read it.
RecommendedRead it at the library. They almost all have it. I never buy it. They should pay the readers.
RecommendedI think feature content shows up online after a while, sometimes. If they posted it online right away, nobody would buy the hard copy, eh?
RecommendedThese would seem to represent the bike version of a semi-truck on a roadway. They move lots of stuff, but they can be slower, ride with more momentum (p=m*v), and could be more difficult to pass when you’ve only got one lane (i.e., bike lane) to work with. They burn much less diesel though, so I’m okay with that! Maybe we’ll need two lane bike lanes then?
RecommendedYes to two bike lanes!
I moved by bike on N Williams Ave. With a huge load, people give you space when passing, but it would work a lot better if it had two lanes for bikes. Then the slow traffic could keep right, the fast traffic zip by on the left, and the medium speed switch back and forth as needed.
“Bike Passing Lane” concept part of the “Best Practices” section of the Portland 2030 Bike Plan. If you know of a place that has a lot of mixed cargo and commuter traffic and would benefit from two bike lanes, you can contact PBOT and request it. email safe@portlandoregon.gov
See the official writeup at http://www.portlandonline.com/transportation/index.cfm?c=44597&a=334689 on “page 2 of 41”
Ted Buehler
RecommendedFaster/slower has everything to do with load and grade, especially with the longtails. If you pack carefully, they are nearly as nimble as a “normal” bike.
RecommendedI wonder if anyone has ever made a guesstimate on the dollar amount the local cycling industry/shops/builders put into the local economy
RecommendedWeird… Reading about cargo bikes in Bicycling magazine is like seeing a pin-up of a Russian Olympic swimmer in Playboy.
RecommendedPerhaps ideas of beauty have changed:the models in the 40’s and 50’s were much chunkier…
Recommendedhmm. i seem to remember cargo bikes in portland prior to november 2006. working downtown 5 days a week, even. 🙂
RecommendedYeah, I’m pretty sure that I worked at a shop that shipped a number of cargo bikes to the portland area prior to 2006. Not to mention the folks down in Eugene who have been making them for years…
RecommendedYep. There were cargo bikes in Portland before I imported my Bakfiets here via the first bulk shipment to the US (to Florida) in early 2005(?) from Workcycles.
The cargo bikes you saw on Portland’s streets back then were mainly made by Jan at CAT in Eugene. He has basically doing in since the late 1980s back in NYC before he relocated in the 1990s to Oregon. Plus old schholl Workcycle trike or two and pedicabs.
RecommendedSorry about the typos…typing and eating dinner is not ideal.
RecommendedObviously there were cargo bikes here before Clever Cycles… But their shop (and their expertise) made them available to a whole new audience and made them common in Portland. So, in many ways they formally introduced cargo bikes to the city to a degree that had never been done before.
Recommendedummmm…….
RecommendedThey did over charge for them first…..
Save the world, buy more stuff?!
Cargo bikes are anathema to living with a smaller footprint. Even if you’ve got a car to take off the street, you can’t park your bike on the curb.
RecommendedI’m not following.
No one here is discouraging you from having a team of oxen tied to the ring in the curb.
In the meantime, though, I think 100 million cargo bikes (or perhaps a similar number of bike trailers to pull behind the bikes we already have) would go a long way toward ‘saving the world’ if we did trade in our cars.
RecommendedIf you “save the world” with a cargo bike instead of a car, you need a place to put it. If you’ve got indoor space to give over to a cargo bike (it sure won’t work in apartments), then you’ve got space to give up.
RecommendedYour determination to castigate cargo bikes is just a little weird. But now that you’ve chosen a team of oxen to haul your cargo, how about a piece of corrugated metal to put over your (neighbor’s) cargo bike. I’ll even give you/him four 2x4s to hold it up. Geez.
RecommendedTaking a car off the road forever is a wonderful thing. You can do one better by replacing it with nothing.
I’m anything but virtuous, but still believe that paying an indulgence to the Church of Green is not the same as resisting the temptation of consumption in the first place. There’s nothing green about building a bike, shipping it overseas, and giving it indoor space to keep it safe and in good condition.
For what it’s worth, my cargo needs are met by an upcycled Burley trailer.
Recommended“For what it’s worth, my cargo needs are met by an upcycled Burley trailer.”
Recommendedsame here.
You’ve got to be kidding- cargo bikes “anathema” to smaller footprint? Really?
RecommendedI believe you have that completely reversed.
You don’t EVER need to move something that’s non-bike friendly?
Lamps, cabinets, bookcases, plants, potting soil, computers, chairs, etc… That’s all stuff that can be easily transported w/ a cargo bike
Most people have more “stuff” than 4 walls and a cot.
You can’t leave the thing out on the street. How’s that giant bike going to get into an apartment, much less the space it will take?
Recommendedyou’d be surprised. Folks with two wheels are a creative lot. I don’t even think Giant makes a cargo bike.
RecommendedPlenty of apartments have ground level garages (e.g., marina district, SF). Roll right in. Mine, I store hung vertically, on hooks that grab the stoker bars. Or perhaps bicycle trees ( http://www.biketree.com/ ). Or use a hoist: ( http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2010/06/flashback-swiveling-balcony-hoist.html ).
Or replace a single car parking space with a sheltered, locked cage for multiple bikes; I can’t find the link, but I’ve seen at least one of these that was made in the shape of a car.
I am not getting your apparent obsession with this one tiny increment of consumption, or with your assumption that we would change so many things, yet not find a way to park a bike that was a mere 15 inches longer than the ones we ride already.
RecommendedClever Cycles did not introduce these to Portland, as stated above.
They just imported European options, instead of selling the fabulous Oregon Made options..
These were on Portland streets when Clever was still Daddie’s little squirt…
Just sayin’.
RecommendedAs I said above Dabby. I realize that. But Clever took them out of just being the domain of messengers and plugged-in carfree folks and brought them into the mainstream. Perhaps I shouldn’t have used the word “introduced” in the story.
RecommendedJust for the record, I bought a bamboo cargo trailer from Adam George last year, it’s been a life-changer.
I had always been adept at bungeeing milk crates to bike racks, hanging baskets on bike racks, and schleeping long, wide and/or heavy loads. I’d been doing it for years.
But now I have a flatbed trailer. 3′ wide, 6′ long. Weighs under 30 lbs, can carry 600 lbs. I’ve carried stoves, washing machines, sacks of concrete mix, fruit trees, sofas, piles of bikes, 20′ planks (with a smaller trailer behind), 3 adults at once, most of my friends at one time or another. It can carry anything I own (except my car). Moreover, it can carry huge piles of stuff — stacked wide, tall and long.
I moved my entire house of stuff by bike, about 1/3 of it on my own, and it wasn’t tedious at all.
I park the trailer in my basement. But even if I was in an apartment it could go in a closet — it’s very light, and low-profile. You could haul it up a flight of stairs every night without much trouble.
Realistically, my bamboo trailer can carry many things that my station wagon can’t carry, and it can carry them better. For furniture and sacks of concrete, it’s easier to load. It’s closer to the ground, you can stand on 3 sides of it, and there’s no sides or roof to deal with.
Portland is a great city to lead the way in cargo bike use — it’s fairly flat, the cost of living is low so folks aren’t in a huge hurry all the time, there’s a great system of bike boulevards, and there’s always an appreciative audience for riders.
Cheers to carrying cargo by bike, I hope to see many more heavy-haul rigs on the roads, for carrying cargo and kids and anything in between.
Ted Buehler
RecommendedI couldn’t agree more, Ted. One thing you forgot to mention, though, is that for the REALLY heavy things, the things you can’t pick up, can’t even pick up with your friends’ help, a bike trailer can often be backed underneath or alongside such that you can tip or scoot the heavy thing onto the flatbed without ever lifting it. Way easier than trying to maneuver something like that into the back of a pickup – forget it.
RecommendedDabby, for the record we solicited CAT in the early days, inviting them to display their bikes in our shop on consignment terms, as there is/was no reseller margin available. We received no direct reply, but did hear some specious carbon footprint analysis and uncharitable characterizations of our motives through public channels. Their model was (is?) to have customers pay and then wait for however many months it takes (sometimes over a year) for the bike to be built. You can imagine why they were/are such a rare sight.
I’m pretty sure that our making available bikes that families could test and buy the same day, fully equipped for year-round plain-clothes riding, with full local support, numerous accessories, etc. resulted in more car trips being replaced by bike trips in a matter of months than locally-made bikes did over many years. We’re proud of that and the apparent influence our activity has had on locally made bikes (e.g, Metrofiets, CETMAcargo, Shuttlebug, Tom’s, and the glorious freakbike scene) and other shops, too, with family utility/cargo bikes no longer being such a foreign concept.
As for “over charge for them first,” you may not know that retail margins are far lower in the bike trade than most any other, and ours have been particularly low on some of our most popular products, which is maybe part of why not a lot of other places are selling them, not even in other cities with no meaningful competition. In fact, prices have gone up on the iconic Bakfiets Cargobike because … you think we’re getting rich?… because there are better parts on them than ever, at our specific request. We are proud to sell the Eugene-made CETMAcargo bikes, by the way, which at $1850 frame/fork are i think the least expensive locally made long-johns, and they ride great.
Recommended