Load Carrying

There has been a trend over the last few years for fashionable shops in bijou areas to plant a transporter bike outside the front, with their name on it. It never goes anywhere, it never carries much more than a couple of plant-pots, but creates a nice image. People like transporter bikes.They serve as a challenge to car culture and characterless, dehumanising shopping malls which depend so intimately on the surrounding car park.

Have the days when using a bike for carrying heavy loads was a practical option gone forever? Apparently not. There has been a distinct counter-trend to the creation of new shopping centres, as cities wake up to the fact that they can compete, if they make the effort.While most shoppers still love cars, they don't like them in the streets they actually shop in. So city-centres are gradually freezing out the motor-vehicle.

Sometimes planners have shown a tendency to throw the baby out with the bath water, to restrict the bicycle along with the motor car. But with the car removed, access can be improved for both cyclists and pedestrians. Locals on bicycles can again enjoy rapid access to their city centres, while day trippers can wander around without risk of being mown down by a truck. But there is still a need to move goods around, whether it's a big load of mail to the post office, or just a pile of shopping to a car park on the edge of town.

Fortunately, parallel to this renewed demand for low-impact, versatile carrying machines have come exciting new developments in bike technology, producing strength without crippling weight, a wide choice of gears and brakes capable of arresting the largest load. A huge range of options are available now, ranging from trailers with a 30kg payload to quadricycles which will take a quarter of a tonne. There's no pretending that that 250kg load will pedal the vehicle up a hill for you, but these 'bicycle HGVs' can easily outclass their diesel equivalents in certain scenarios, when all the implications of motorised deliveries are taken into account: fuel costs, insurance, maintenance, capital, parking and access restrictions.

Pedal-powered deliveries also mean healthier, happier, more productive staff. And intrigued, admiring customers.Once again, human power wins out, when used in the right way, in the right place. Load-carrying cycles are popular with the public at large mainly because they're cute. They are popular with businesses because they are incredibly efficient at carrying out their specific roles. So let's flood our towns and cities with them and see how our environment improves.