π΄π² Welcome to the Utility Cycling Community! π²π΄
Are you a passionate cyclist who believes that bicycles can transform the way we move around our cities and towns? Are you interested in exploring the world of utility biking, where bicycles are a tool for practicality, sustainability, and adventure? If so, you've come to the right place!
Cargo bikes are awesome. Plus they hold value pretty well so you can resell them when your kids get to big. Iβm the third owner of a cargo bike and itβs been great.
Grandma is 71 and not in the best of health.
βI knew that she probably wasnβt gonna be able to bicycle very far on her own,β Poole said.
She chose a Bunch front-loader, a model with two front wheels and a box large enough for an adult to sit in, so Grandma wouldnβt miss anything.
βWe rode her around the parking garage a little, and she was like, βThis is the bomb diggety.ββ
Grandma sounds like such a cutie
sometimes taking the extreme step of replacing a car with a cargo bike
This is not extreme.
Extreme is when you choose to use a fossil fuel car during the climate catastrophe.
Wait, are you saying carrying multiple tons of steel every time you need milk is extreme?
yeah but!!! the rain, it's wet!! and stuffs! Oh !! and red lights ! checkmate
Lots of places the nearest Costco is 10+miles away.
What's your point?
I like the spin here. Headline should be "Most working middle-class citizens pushed out of the market for new vehicles".
You can buy two good cargo bikes a year for the average total cost of ownership of a car. When so many trips are within bike range, why would you not do this?
We still need to fill edge cases. Hiking is really big where I live but you can't take public transit to more than one or two trailheads, and certainly not some of the more remote ones.
I desperately want a nonprofit carshare in my area to fill the gap for this as well as occasional things like moving lots of stuff. Without a cost effective way to get a car when you really need one, people will own a car for edge cases. And when you have a car sitting there... you'll drive it even when you don't need to.
fwiw there might be platforms that let you just rent out the car when it's not in use, it's a thing here and my landlord company even puts their cars on it!
(It's GoMore, only available in a couple countries but you can look at it for an example of how it works)
Sometimes it's a lot easier than you think to be the change you want to see. You might be amazed at how far you get before you run into significant roadblocks.
Sounds like you have a project. :P
I would choose the healthier option (the cargo bikes). I just don't want to be corralled down a cattle chute where there are no other options. I would also use my vehicle to haul the elderly around, if required (not a cargo bike).
A second car has an annual upkeep cost of $8,000, while a cargo bike can be purchased for $3,000
Kinda sad they didn't say the annual upkeep costs of a cargo e-bike
It's like maybe $200 if you ride a lot and less if you do any of your own work... Which you can because it's a bike.
AAA estimated that it was over 12k in 2024. I doubt that price has gone down.
How much groceries can you fit on a bike? I usually leave with 4 or 5 large bags, and I'm single.
Bag size varies a lot so an absolute number doesn't really help much. 4/5 bags sounds like an insane amount of food for 1 person, so I suspect the bags we get are bigger.
My regular bike has 70L of storage in pannier bags. Cargo bikes will be holding hundreds.
4/5 seems insane
How many times do you go get groceries each week though?
About 2 weeks worth for 1 person, about 1 weeks worth for 2 people. On just a normal bicycle with 4 panniers. A cargo bike can double that.
Once you hit large families, you can have multiple people biking to the grocery store together.
Our Urban Arrow fits 3, maybe 4 kids (ours are 7 and 4, and their friends). We literally moved our entire apartment with that bike.
We also have a cube hybrid longtail. I've put maybe 6 bags of groceries in the side saddle, with my front still open and two kids on the back.
there are DOZENS of us!
Quite a lot more I think. Not everybody needs a cargo bike, but they're really amazing for moving a couple young kids a couple miles
in my fairly generic swedish town there's a whole bunch of people with box bikes, to the point that my dad gets annoyed at them (i think because they tend to be car replacements, so people keep that driver mindset of assuming people will just give way to you and never fucking slowing down).
So yeah i'd say globally there's a whole lot of cargo bike owners these days.
One of the hardest parts of these articles is that I love hearing about them, hearing how much people are making progress and change, until I see the locations. I love seeing that a metropolitan area has this, and it warms my heart to see people able to make progress.
My bike is not a cargo bike, just a normal city bike with bags on it, which is satisfactory for the 3 miles of highway I have to bike to the nearest store, and then 3 miles back, ever since the one that was closer had closed down. I do this at night, or first in the morning, as where I live during the daytime it reaches over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, over 39 degrees Celsius.
Man, I'd love to take my kids around town on my bike, but drivers here regularly go off the road and hit cyclists. I just don't know if I'd feel comfortable taking my kids out, unless I was in a protected bike lane. It takes about twenty minutes to get to the park and I have to cross several streets, one of which is six lanes across. And I live in the city. Our city is investing in more cycling infrastructure and greenways, but right now, I just can't. Not to mention when it's over 40Β°C and 80% humidity, by the time I get to the park, it's time to go home, unless I'm driving. It's just a super complicated situation, I'm in. I do welcome any and all advice!
Talk more about your problem. Complain as much as possible to your city government. Organize or join a transit union.
It also sounds like your city needs more green space. Yeah, my only advice is, "fight like hell for you kid's future."
Absolutely! I'm a part of a couple different cycling groups, one of which actively lobbies and is the reason our city is actually changing for the better. We're also super behind on our canopy coverage, and topographically I'm surrounded by rivers which increase the humidity. So, when it's hot, it's very hot.
It's one of those things that my grown children will be able to enjoy, but it's shameful it's taking this long. I just wish progress was quicker.
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"Car" "go" "bike"
lol