Cargo Bikes for Business: Do They Make Sense Today?

Telephone installers and cargo bike
Telephone installers and cargo bike.

Kris de Decker

The cable guys in the Netherlands used to arrive on these huge tandem cargo bikes. They are shown on Transportfiets, an entire website devoted to cargo bikes, found by Kris at No Tech Magazine.

cargo bike wayback machine photo cable guys

If it was a smaller job, the phone company had a fleet of smaller cargo bikes.

cargo bike wayback machine photo kitty litter exchange

But keep far away from these guys; they work for 1e Hoofdstelijke Kattenbakcentrale, or First Capital Cat Central, a kitty litter exchange service. They come to your house and take away the old cat litter and supply you with clean litter. Sounds like a great business plan.

cargo bike wayback machine photo race

There even used to be cargo bike races. I wonder what combination of difficult parking, high fuel prices and congestion charges would make this way of doing business viable again.