It’s nothing new to have bicycles as commercial haulers. In much of the world, bicycles are commonly used to haul both freight and passengers. In the US, where I live, I remember hundreds of delivery bikes on the streets of New York when I was a child: industrial-frame one-speeds with huge boxes on the front. More recently, many cities have added bicycle-rickshaws to their public transportation fleets, competing directly with gas-powered taxis. They’re cheaper and of course much greener than motorized ones, and in congested, traffic-clogged cities, often just as fast.
My much more rural area has had Pedal People, a bicycle-based trash-hauling and farmshare-delivery company, since 2002. Oh yeah, and when I was a high school student in the 1970s, I commuted by bike, 5-1/2 miles uphill in New York City traffic, when the weather permitted. It saved me half an hour each way over the bus, because the bus route was far from linear (although I could read on the bus and not on my bike).
So what makes this decade different?
First, the growing green consciousness. When people who are already disposed to lower their carbon footprint (and their costs) learn that bicycles are really viable transportation alternatives in many cases, the switch becomes easy.
And second, the rapidly developing technology of bicycles. The kind of high-tech freight-hauling bikes described in this article about a bike-powered cargo company in Victoria, British Columbia would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.
