By Emily Kerr<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Emily Kerr is a city councillor for St Mary\u2019s Ward, Oxford<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Last month, Amazon announced a \u00a3300 m investment in the UK: electrifying its vans and shifting more cities to cargo-bike deliveries. Oxford now has three medium-sized businesses using cargo bikes for delivery: Pedal & Post, Velocity and Oxwash. And we have a sole-trader: a cargo-bike gardening business launched last year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I spoke to Vaska Raine, who set up Park Town Garde<\/a>ner<\/a>, about why he uses a cargo bike.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It just seemed better than sitting in a traffic jam burning fossil fuels \u2013 it\u2019s quicker, it\u2019s more efficient, it\u2019s cheaper, and it\u2019s greener. I work with nature all day long and I wanted to do my bit to help cut emissions where I could. We are trying to be greener in other ways too, composting and recycling in a responsible way.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Park Town Gardener operates within the ring-road, and Vaska says cycling is much better than he thought it would be: riding a bike is fun, quicker and much less stressful than sitting in traffic. Parking is also much easier. Vaska still uses a van occasionally \u2013 maybe once a month \u2013 but says more than 95% of his operations are done by cargo bike. And business is booming. He\u2019s already hired one employee and bought a second bike, and he\u2019s looking for more staff to help out: over the summer he had more work than he could manage and had to stop taking clients for a period, which is pretty impressive for a small business in its first year of trading.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a theme I heard reflected by Chris Benton, Pe<\/a>dal & Post\u2019s<\/a> founder. His company is a cargo-bike logistics firm. It works with individuals, independents, and on behalf of large courier companies, including DPD. Pedal & Post employs 22 people, impressively all at the London living wage (\u00a311.95 an hour) and are constantly adding more routes and contracts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Business is really strong. We\u2019re super busy, and have just added three new routes. Logistics is a low-margin business but our people are important to us and paying them properly is part of our ethos. We want to make deliveries greener, and by getting vans off the streets, we make roads safer for people walking and cycling \u2013 and we cut emissions and improve air quality.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n Jake Swinhoe, who runs Velocity<\/a>, a new cargo-bike delivery company, agrees. \u201cWe launched earlier this year and we\u2019re already helping 30 local businesses with their deliveries. And people seem to really love bikes showing up with their items \u2013 we get a lot of smiles.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Cargo bikes can save a lot of money<\/a>. There\u2019s a plumber in Derby who estimated using an e-cargo bike has more than halved his travel costs, and Vaska says he\u2019s spent just \u00a370 on his bike in the last 12 months \u2013 which is less than a tank of fuel (although Vaska\u2019s bike isn\u2019t electric, and pedalling a full cargo bike up Morrell Avenue isn\u2019t for everyone).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The final thing I\u2019ve noticed about cargo-bike<\/a> users is a great sense of community. When I take my children on my bike they wave and get waved at, and I\u2019ve noticed them high-fiving other cargo-bike kids as they pass on our streets. Vaska, Chris and Jake are all supportive of the idea of other people launching cargo-bike businesses and happy to give advice to anyone serious about doing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I can also recommend Park Town\u2019s services \u2013 Vaska helped me choose a suitable tree to plant for National Tree Planting Week (end November). Cargo-bike businesses are growing rapidly, and I\u2019m optimistic that we\u2019ll continue to see more and more in Oxford \u2013 delivering cleaner air, less congested streets, and helping the city do its bit towards reducing transport emissions<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Emily Kerr<\/p>\n Last month, Amazon announced a \u00a3300 m investment in the UK: electrifying its vans and shifting more cities to cargo-bike deliveries. Oxford now has three medium-sized businesses using cargo bikes for delivery: Pedal & Post, Velocity and Oxwash. And we have a sole-trader: a cargo-bike gardening business launched last year.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":10276,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"cybocfi_hide_featured_image":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4],"tags":[88,5,53,7,35],"class_list":["post-10275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-on-yer-bike","tag-bike-delivery","tag-blog","tag-cargo-bike","tag-on-yer-bike","tag-vision-zero"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10275"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10275\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cyclox.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Gardening by bike<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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Eco-couriers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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A cargo-bike community<\/h2>\n\n\n\n