National attention for cargo bikes, Portland in Bicycling Magazine

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.

Well, let’s see what we hear and see from Interbike… “If cargo can make there, it can make it everywhere…”

Congrats 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

And 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.

this 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!?

These 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?

Weird… Reading about cargo bikes in Bicycling magazine is like seeing a pin-up of a Russian Olympic swimmer in Playboy.

Obviously 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.

Champs
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.

Recommended 0

You’ve got to be kidding- cargo bikes “anathema” to smaller footprint? Really?
I 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.

Clever 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’.

Just 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

Dabby, 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.