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May 18, 2024
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Cargo e-bikes making final-mile trips may prove the future for delivery in dense urban environments in an effort to cut the number of big delivery trucks.
We recently reported on “eQuad” e-bikes that joined UPS’s delivery fleet in the United Kingdom. Now, the city of New York has announced that it is testing a similar delivery vehicle. Meant to be a model for delivery companies such as UPS, Amazon and FedEx, the eQuad, conforms to new rules New York issued in March.
The new rules are remarkably generous; they stipulate that a cargo e-bike can be as much as: 16 feet long, 7 ft. tall and 4 ft. wide. The prototype, called Cargi B thanks to an online poll, was made by Montana-based Coaster Cycles, which makes several different cargo e-trikes as well as a trailer. Cargo e-bikes are restricted to a maximum speed of 15 mph in New York.
Occupying four feet of a bike lane or bike path that may be only eight or nine feet wide will make things crowded, but New York is addressing things from an infrastructure standpoint as well. Bike lanes on Third, Ninth and Tenth avenues have already been widened to 10 ft.
New York begins congestion pricing June 30. Trucks traveling below 60th Ave. can be charged as much as $36 per day. The city is also looking to develop what it calls “Blue Highways.”
Referring to the city’s waterways, the Blue Highways initiative is meant to encourage delivery companies to utilize the water as a means of delivery to a distribution center, from which cargo e-bikes would make the final delivery.
In delivery lingo, “Last mile” refers to the final portion of delivery, the point at which large-scale distribution starts to become an issue in terms of traffic congestion and parking. Reducing this impact eases traffic for other users.
Conceivably, Amazon or UPS could set up distribution centers at several piers and move packages from a central warehouse to the distribution centers on the water, eliminating all those brown and gray trucks on the city’s roads and then use cargo e-bikes to make deliveries to the packages’ final destination.
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