Better infrastructure for transporting people by bike is great. But cycle freight could free up roads and transform cities and towns too

Cycle freight: why the bike is good for moving more than people

The plastic bike basket I bought online was billed as “large”, but even so I was amazed when it arrived. This was a behemoth – a cavernous, black box into which you could as easily fit a decent-sized dog as a bag of shopping.

Fitted to my new commuter bike, the initial effect was comical. But such worries were soon forgotten given how astonishingly useful it proved.

My sizeable work bag – which used to be jammed in lengthways into the much smaller, now-defunct predecessor – vanished into the dark recesses, leaving space for shopping, coats, school bags, whatever was required. My life was transformed.

So yes, this is a minor but heartfelt paean to the ability of bikes to carry not just people, but things. It might seem an obvious point, but it’s one oddly lost on many people.

In part, I was previously among that group. While I had toured on a pannier-strewn machine, when commuting I would generally strap a bag to my back, preferring the lightness and manoeuvrability of an unladen bike for darting about city streets. But it all feels that much more civilised once you let the bike do the heavy lifting.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Peter Walker’s bike, complete with the ‘behemoth’ of a bike basket. Photograph: Peter Walker/The Guardian

And this can be done in so many ways. Panniers are the most common. During one, very long, overseas trek many years ago, at its peak my bike was weighed down with probably about 20kg of luggage, and in one isolated leg included a big plastic jerry can of spare water as well as camping gear.

It was on this trip that I realised why people also use those slightly funny-looking, low-slung front panniers – one hill proved so steep that the mountain of luggage at the back kept dragging me into an unplanned wheelie.

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In contrast, loading the weight on to the front of the bike, as with my current bathtub-capacity basket, seems to pose fewer problems if you’re happy to adapt to slightly more ponderous steering.



You can also keep an eye on everything, avoiding that anxious glance backwards at traffic lights to check your pannier is still in place, or hasn’t opened. Of course, potholes can bump things out of a basket, so I use a cargo net clipped over the top.

When the load gets heavier still, there is always a cargo trailer. I have a cheap, hugely over-engineered metal-framed trailer on two wheels, which takes care of big supermarket shops, even lower-scale clearance trips to the municipal tip.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The author’s bike trailer after a trip to a local garden centre. Photograph: Peter Walker/The Guardian

The obvious caveat here is that my local supermarket is a five-minute ride down local roads. Cycling would be less appealing if it involved a longer distance, or more fearsome traffic. But the point remains – bikes are about much more than just carrying human beings.

In fact, for all the current (and necessary) debate about building safe cycle routes to take people to and from work and other destinations, helping to unclog the roads, and freeing up space on public transport, it is arguable that an even greater revolution could come with cycle freight.

This isn’t a new concept. Not so many years ago, delivery by bike was routine across Britain and remains so in many other less industrialised nations.

Newer bike-based cargo and courier firms have been around for a while but advances in e-bike technology are increasing the loads that such machines can carry and also the ease of use, particularly in hilly places.

Sleek, whirring machines are increasingly visible, even in places like the UK, where the delivery giant DHL is using them. Elsewhere, the ambitions are greater, as with Gothenburg’s “armadillo”, an articulated bike-and-trailer system that transports deliveries to city centre shops and businesses.

Such creations could prove revolutionary. As many cities see fewer people using private cars for transport, in their place are thousands of vans, often delivering teeny, Amazon-type packages, the bulk of which could easily be carried by cargo bikes.

This could be the future – logistics hubs on the edges of towns or cities, from which fleets of silent, safe, non-polluting, manoeuvrable, easy-to-park cargo bikes could appear.

And before that freight utopia arrives, just remember – more or less any bike can generally carry more than you think.