Building the Cycling City

by Melissa Bruntlett

  The vision of far fewer trucks traveling in the public realm is indeed enticing, and one Maus imagines could provide the impetus for real and lasting change. He points to the August 2017 death of 41-year-old Tamar Monhait, killed by a left-turning truck in an industrial area just a few blocks from B-Line’s headquarters. “If it was picked up by the right advocacy effort, the safety improvements that come with pedal-powered freight could really catch on,” he declares. “The kinds of trucks we’re currently using are far too big for our cities. They are incompatible with human life. And there’s definitely a political urgency building around that issue.”

  The act of parking and unloading these trucks is perhaps an even more substantial obstacle to human-friendly streets, and it is now often done in the very facilities designed to protect cyclists. Maus brings up the City of Portland’s “Central City in Motion” plan, a comprehensive strategy to improve transportation in the core that is still in development but is due to be officially unveiled in June 2018. According to his sources, dealing with truck loading and unloading zones is one area where staff are doing a lot of handwringing, which he fears is resulting in a great deal of compromise. “If there was an advocacy plan on the table that said ‘Let’s get rid of these trucks and use cargo bikes instead,’ that could actually have a big impact,” he argues. “That could set the stage for some major leaps forward.”

  As far as the cargo bike has come in recent years, Maus believes it has reached a point where it needs government-led policy and street design to achieve its optimal capacity. “If some city were to really embrace its potential, and come out as a leader, they stand to gain a lot. It just seems so ripe,” he submits. “We reach these roadblocks in North American cities where people can’t think big when it comes to changing how we use streets, what we do on our streets, and the general culture of our streets. There are a lot of mental roadblocks that lead to physical roadblocks.”

  And much like the case of e-bikes, sales of cargo bikes for personal use also stand to plateau without the proper incentives and infrastructure in place. “The type of people most likely to want to use cargo bikes are also the type who want better infrastructure for their biking,” he says. “And they don’t have that. So sales are going to hit a ceiling to some degree.” Maus recollects his partner Julie test-driving a Clever Cycles bakfiets for a period of several weeks, only to decide against purchasing it for a variety of reasons, including the lack of accessible and secure parking, and the absence of curb cuts on many streets.

  But Maus is particularly excited by the powerful combination of electrification and cargo biking, and reckons Portland is well placed to lead the charge towards a quieter, cleaner, safer, and healthier future. “In addition to the people who are evangelistic about cargo bikes, Portland has an exciting scene of people who see electrifying them as a natural fit. And those two worlds have merged,” Maus asserts. “It’s really transformative what electric-powered cargo bikes can do to a city.”

  Reimagining the Shipping Container

  In addition to UPS’s rather modest entry into the world of cycle logistics in Portland, German distribution giant DHL are rolling out their own last-mile solution on the streets of five Dutch cities (as well as locations in Austria, Belgium, and Germany), in the hopes they can scale it up to global proportions in the coming years. Much like Rotterdam embraced the shipping container as a concept that revolutionized international shipping, DHL is betting that a smaller, cargo-bike-sized container will do the same for urban freight. Acting as the primary last-mile vehicle in that visionary new model is the “Armadillo,” a four-wheeled pedelec developed in Gothenburg, Sweden, by Velove CEO and cofounder Johan Erlandsson.

  While completing his “half-PhD” in engineering focused on energy and the environment at Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenberg, Erlandsson was particularly interested in motor-vehicle technology, especially the emerging trend of electric- and hydrogen-powered cars, until one day he came to a stark realization: “I recognized that if you run the numbers, and look at how many resources you have to put into a car, and the energy supply needed to propel that car, the idea that every household should have one or two cars doesn’t fit into a sustainable budget.”

  A 2006 visit to Copenhagen opened his eyes to the world of cargo bikes, inspiring Erlandsson to return home and replace his Toyota Prius with a Nihola front-loading tricycle. As he began to research the topic of the velo-mobile—a weather-protected, human-powered vehicle with low wind resistance—he got the idea of combining it with the carrying capacity of a cargo bike, creating what he imagined would be a “car killer.” “You would have almost all the qualities you get from a car,” he suggests, “but in something that uses so little resources and energy that it’s actually something everyone on earth could own and use every day. It’s a factor of 15 to 20 times more efficient than a car, while doing the same transport work of short trips in cities.”

  Erlandsson used a sustainability discussion board he was managing at the time to lead an online brainstorming session, which culminated in an in-person workshop with 10 advisors from various professional backgrounds who settled on a basic set of qualities they would like to see in such a vehicle. “After that, my dad built the first prototype, which was on almost no budget. Less than €500 [$620 USD],” he recalls. “It was a four-wheel bike. No suspension or e-assist. But it was extremely stable and relaxed.”

  While he was chasing down grant money, the promise of this first prototype was enough to convince Erlandsson to simultaneously start his own bike courier business in Gothenburg, which eventually allowed him to scrape together enough funds for a second prototype, this time with a €5,000 budget ($6,200 USD) that equipped it with front suspension and electric assist. Around that time, however, Erlandsson realized that, while the professional market for a “car killer” already exists, the personal market still needs time to develop. “The price level is such that if you replaced a van with this bike, it would be considered relatively cheap,” he explains. “But if you sold this to regular households, it would be considered a very expensive bike. So this is when we started to focus more on developing the vehicle for professional logistics.”

  This renewed push was boosted by an unexpected windfall of €25,000 ($31,000 USD), half of which came from state funding and the other half via contest-prize money from a local energy company. That injection of capital was enough for Velove to hire engineers from the Dutch company Flevobike—specialist producers of velomobiles and two-wheeled recumbent bicycles—to refine Velove’s design into a market-ready product.

  Fearing the Armadillo might make cycle paths less attractive to new and existing users, Erlandsson stressed to the engineers that the final design must be congruent with existing bike infrastructure. And at 86 centimeters (34 inches) wide—a little narrower than most family cargo trikes—and 160-centimeters (63 inches) high—no taller than an adult on an upright bicycle, they definitely accomplished that. “The whole reason why we do this is for sustainability reasons, and we want people to move from cars to bikes,” he insists. “We’ve done everything we can to minimize the impact on other cyclists.”

  In the spring of 2014, when Flevobike were in the process of building Erlandsson’s third prototype northeast of Amsterdam, he decided to accept Jos Sluijsmans’s invitation to attend the International Cargo Bike Festival 100 kilometers away in Nijmegen. There he made a connection with a representative from DHL, which would further refine the design of his invention. “At that time, the box looked like a container, but it was bolted onto the back of the bike,” Erlandsson recalls. “They asked us, ‘Can you make this detachable?’ We said, ‘Sure we can.’ So we solved the detachability, and it became a modular container.” Unbeknownst to Erlandsson, DHL was already exploring containerization with smaller boxes that fit onto the front-loading Bullitt bike—but the back-loading Armadillo suddenly opened up a world of fresh possibilities.

  Under their current delivery model, DHL Express utilizes t
erminals strategically located adjacent to the nearest airport, where packages are sorted and loaded onto the shelves of large vans, which transport them directly to the receiver’s doorstep. Under the new, experimental model, parcels are loaded directly into the shipping containers based on their destination, and then several containers are picked up and stacked in a central location by a single truck. Each container is then transferred to a cargo bike, which can then run a route of up to 40 parcels, returning the empty container when the deliveries are completed. These empties are then sent back to the airport terminal by van, traveling anywhere from 20 to 40 kilometers away from the city center.

  Figure 6-4: Velove’s “Armadillo” cargo bike in action, complete with detachable container, which DHL hopes will revolutionize urban freight. (Credit: DHL Express)

  “The pure business argument is that you get high productivity in congested cities, because you’re faster on a cargo bike in a dense city center,” explains Erlandsson. With up to double the productivity—twice as many parcels delivered per hour with a bike than a van, and a lower cost of ownership—the expense of purchasing the vehicle, maintenance, fuel, etc.—one can easily understand why DHL are keen to expand this model outside of its testing phase, which includes the Dutch cities of Alkmaar, Breda, Houten, Nijmegen, and Utrecht. That’s not even considering the substantial public-relations benefits, such as a viral March 2017 Tech Insider video viewed over 6.5 million times. “They had never seen anything like that,” declares Erlandsson.

  Knowing a good branding opportunity when they saw one, DHL Americas even went as far as to ship an Armadillo—rebranded as the “Cubicycle”—to New York City in July 2017, opening the New York Stock Exchange, and participating in the closing ceremony of the penultimate race of the 2016–17 “Formula E” electric street racing season. The bike will remain in Manhattan, and—if approved by regulators for US streets—will lead the first urban containerization pilot on North American soil.

  With the Cubicycle now front and center on DHL’s marketing materials, it looks likely to be a major player in their climate strategy, aiming for net-zero transport-related carbon emissions by 2050, with 70 percent of all last-mile deliveries made by “clean” modes of transportation (either electric van or bike). Considering the increased productivity and decreased operating costs, it is highly likely that deliveries will be made by bike where it is possible, and motor vehicles will only be employed as a last resort.

  In addition to an aggressive scale-up plan based on their growing relationship with DHL, which includes a second production line in the Czech Republic, Erlandsson is consulting with several cities about overhauling much of their urban freight into a consolidated, container-based system. “They see this as the way forward, as a way to transition to a more responsive and city-friendly logistics industry,” he explains. In his hometown of Gothenburg, for example, city officials are testing a publicly run enterprise that combines packages from two private companies in a small electric van. That single vehicle replaces two large, half-empty trucks roaming sensitive areas such as the city center, allowing the same person to simultaneously deliver packages from two different carriers. Today, this solution requires the costly intermediary step of re-sorting and loading the parcels—but if containerization were to be incorporated, the streamlined operational costs would decrease significantly.

  For Erlandsson and the Velove team, the end goal is about finding exciting new efficiencies in an industry handling larger and larger amounts of freight, especially with the seemingly boundless growth of e-commerce. “We think it’s important to understand when a cargo bike is the best option and when it’s not,” he proposes. “We’re definitely not suggesting that we’re replacing all of the trucks and vans in a city. But we want to replace them when their use is ridiculous, when you use a huge van or truck to deliver very small items. There’s a lot of that inefficiency today.”

  07 BUILD AT A HUMAN SCALE

  Our revenue is healthy people, less traffic, and beautiful living.

  — FRANS JAN VAN ROSSEM

  Head of Bicycle Programming, Utrecht

  Affectionately known as “the biggest village in the country,” Utrecht’s unique charm can be explained, in part, by its medieval buildings, ancient canals, ornate bridges, and cobbled laneways—a rich, 2,000-year history, all contained within compact boundaries. In its infancy, Utrecht marked the northern edge of the Roman Empire, whose fortifications are commemorated today with a series of decorative steel rails embedded in its streets signifying the borders of that ancient fortress. In the centuries that followed, the outpost evolved into the wellspring of Christianity in the Netherlands, as well as an important trading hub—due to its strategic location along the former shore of the River Rhine—protected by a surrounding moat. But in its twentieth-century haste to transform itself into a modern city, its stunning beauty was nearly sacrificed at the altar of the automobile, an “improvement” that was reversed once residents came to the stark realization that a car-first city and a human-scale city are mutually exclusive.

  Despite being on the Nazis’ chopping block, Utrecht managed to make it through the Second World War relatively unscathed, narrowly avoiding the devastating fate suffered 60 kilometers (35 miles) west in Rotterdam. “It was scheduled to be bombed flat by the Germans the day after Rotterdam,” recounts Dutch cycling ambassador and BicycleDutch blogger and filmmaker Mark Wagenbuur, who then adds, “That’s the reason the Dutch capitulated.” The surrender of the Netherlands led to five difficult years of German occupation.

  After the war, this sleepy provincial town started to think bigger, beginning with the expansion of the Jaarbeurs, a million-square-foot exhibition and convention center next to the Centraal railway station. “That became an economic engine for the city, which started to develop and get ideas,” explains Wagenbuur. Planners and politicians were desperate to redevelop the medieval inner city, which was seen as inaccessible and incompatible with their aspirations. “Even road designers were looking jealously at Rotterdam, because they had a blank canvas, saying, ‘They can start anew, and we can’t,’” suggests Wagenbuur. “So they decided, ‘Well, okay, our city wasn’t leveled, so we may have to be bold and do it ourselves.’”

  In 1956, the Utrecht city council approved a memorandum by German traffic engineer M. E. Feuchtinger entitled Toekomst Oude Stad (“Future of the Old City”). Despite his own counts showing that 74 percent of the traffic moving in and out of the city center was of the two-wheeled variety, Feuchtinger called for the demolition of the medieval core to make way for wider streets and parking garages. His calls also included filling in the historic moat to create a wide ring road around the perimeter of the city.

  Unlike Amsterdam, which immediately ridiculed and dismissed the proposal to abolish its canals, Utrecht consented to Feuchtinger’s foolishness, paving over part of the moat, the Catharijnesingel, with a 1.5-kilometer-(1-mile-) long, 11-lane stretch of motorway in 1968. This road was designed to access the adjacent Hoog Catharijne, a huge North American–inspired shopping mall and office complex that opened five years later, in 1973. “They wanted the roads from the US. They wanted the malls from the US,” laments Wagenbuur. But these altogether out-of-scale developments, along with the demolition of cherished buildings and the clear-cutting of trees, were enough to give residents a firsthand view of exactly what they were giving up. “People started to think differently,” recalls Wagenbuur. “They were reacting to plans they saw being built, and reacting to new plans that were being developed. They said, ‘Wait a minute. What we see is already horrible enough. Don’t go on.’”

  According to Wagenbuur, the tight urban fabric of ancient Utrecht was fundamental to its citizens’ rejection of certain modernist principles of urban planning. “There was no way to keep the buildings and to have a car city. It was either–or,” he says. “Cars are so space-inefficient that you can’t have a city that’s on a human scale, and also a car-oriented city at the same time. If you have the
latter, it’s the former that suffers.”

  The Hoog Catharijne project ignited a vociferous opposition from residents and preservationists who opposed any further alteration to the medieval buildings and waterways. Eventually, they attracted the attention of the Dutch culture minister Marga Klompé—the Netherlands’ very first female minister, and a graduate of the University of Utrecht—who in 1972 decreed Utrecht to be “a protected cityscape” of cultural and historic significance, thus formally safeguarding it from the bulldozers. As in Amsterdam, many of the social movements opposed to car-centric modernization represented divergent interests but, without even realizing it, were all working together for the greater good. “Some people were saying, ‘Don’t tear down my home,’” explains Wagenbuur. “Others were saying, ‘Don’t cut down my right to cycle.’ Still others were saying, ‘We shouldn’t ruin these monuments.’ But essentially they all said, ‘We want a liveable city.’ That’s only what we see now, in hindsight.”

  The year 1974 saw the publication of Utrecht’s first traffic-circulation plan that actively considered people on bikes and public transit, proposing a dense, citywide network of physically separated cycle tracks. But most importantly, these infrastructure investments were complemented with measures that made driving a car incrementally more difficult and less desirable, including on-street parking reductions, the construction of bus-only lanes, and traffic-calming streets to a 30-km/h (19-mph) limit.