Cargo bikes come in all shapes and forms, some are used by citizens for their weekly groceries or even to drive the kids to school. Commercial enterprises and shipping companies are also starting to use larger cargo bikes to circumvent access regulations or to provide zero-emission last mile solutions. One might ask: ‘What are the determining factors for enterprises to invest in a fleet of cargo-bikes?’ The answer can be provided by our MOMENTUM partner Technical University of Munich (TUM), which utilised data from the cargo bike testing project ‘Ich entlaste Städte’ (I unburden cities) to analyse the intention to purchase cargo bikes by commercial entities.

You can access the paper through the ‘Transport Research‘ journal.

The available data was generated by a three months-long test trial of different cargo bikes in the framework of the German project, which is the largest of such tests in Europe. According to the researchers at TUM, the intention of purchase of the polled companies is 50% higher than the actual purchasing rate at the end of the testing duration. Thus, this implies that there is a need to convert intention to actual decision, when making conclusions based on intention.

Nevertheless, one main factor to purchase cargo bikes are the underlying regulatory frameworks that discourage companies to use conventional vehicles. Therefore, this observation suggests the necessity of formulating measures to foster the market penetration of cargo cycles.