It's nice to see larger outlets talking about urbanism topics and Vox has made a few videos in this area recently.
Erm how am I meant to take my grandma to hospital and also drop off three fridges and my kids to school and then an entire building's worth of bricks? Therefore cargo bikes will never work in any situation. I am very smart.
I haven't read the article and am here to give my ignorant opinion. This wouldn't work ever anywhere for any reason. Thank you.
Outside of dense urban core there just isn't enough packages per mile to make this even slightly sane. Outside of temperate areas this would be awful when the weather is very cold or very hot. In all areas you would have to secure the packages against trivial theft and rain further adding to the weight and decreasing maximum cargo area.
Even in the fraction of places where this would be practicable differences in speed and cargo capacity means you would need more drivers to achieve the same results. It makes 100x more sense to to push ebikes as an alternative to commuters.
It says urban in the title. And cargo bikes can deliver packages faster than vans.
It looks like they believe they can replace 10% of Vans with bikes if they use Vans or trucks to move stuff to local pickup points and can thereby replace 10% of their vans with bikes in very dense urban core. This is interesting but underwhelming.
Where did you get 10% from, the article says
Recent estimates from Europe suggest that up to 51% of all freight journeys in cities could be replaced by cargo bike
Are we redefining moving all freight to collection points near endpoints with all vans all the time and moving 51% the last 3 miles as handling 51% of freight with bikes? Even so call me when you've actually done it some places
I don't work in logistics, so I won't be doing this. You can read the paper quoted and that should answer your questions: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352146516000478
In my city this wouldn't work, the millisecond the delivery guy turns away his head, assholes would have stolen all the deliveries. It could be used only from point to point, not fully loaded with hundreds of small deliveries
An armored crate would increase the weight too much for human propulsion
A couch would probably need a box van to deliver it lol, I don't think you can easily fit one into a standard panel van without getting a little creative
Ive moved using a LWB van. Could have probably fitted 3 couches easily 6 if I stacked em.
A Post or car derived van can take one easily possibly 2