Maker
Cargo Bike Power
Car-free carrying makes a comeback. By Joshua Hart
If you want to wean yourself away from petro- leum dependence, try a cargo bike. A good one lets a relatively fit adult transport 500 pounds
of stuff across level ground, so a few bags of
groceries are cake. In recent years, increasing
concerns about the environment and energy
dependence have made cargo bikes a hot topic
for makers and tinkerers who want to design an
important piece of the future.
The concept isn’t new, of course. Bikes specially
designed to transport cargo are nearly as old as
the bicycle itself. Starting in the late 19th century,
cargo bikes were used in many developed countries to carry items that would otherwise have
required horsepower, and they continued to be
used to deliver things like bread, milk, and mail
until after World War II, when cars and trucks took
over in industrialized countries.
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But designing cargo capacity into pedal-powered
transportation is a challenge that not only presents
questions of where, what, how, and how much to
carry, it also complicates all the usual bike design
tradeoffs — balancing weight, strength, cost, gearing, frame geometry, wheel size, and so on.
It’s a vast, messy, multivariable problem that
can’t be optimized for all applications. But over
the generations, a few popular strategies have
evolved that do a good job with common types of
cargo and terrain. Makers like Joshua Muir and
Saul Griffith are adding their own ideas to the field,
building a revolution not just in cargo-bike design,
but in the way people live.
Classic Carriers
How do people carry loads on bikes? Many popular
“cargo bikes” are just regular bikes with cargo
Photograph by Paul Gower
