The dangers of cargo bikes

Jake Wallis Simons

My first encounter with the cargo bicycle came more than ten years ago. I was a features writer at the Sunday Telegraph and had three very small children; my assignment was to spend a few weeks trying out three different designs for ferrying kids and shopping and then reach a verdict on which was best.

What is a cargo bike, I hear you ask? Put simply, it is a monumental pain in the arse

What is a cargo bike, I hear you ask? Put simply, it is a monumental pain in the arse. It is either a bicycle or a tricycle with a box bolted to the front, in which you put your children and other things. It is about three-quarters of the width of a family car, meaning that when it comes to size, it occupies that infuriating twilight zone between bicycle and motor vehicle, while in terms of speed, it goes no faster than 8mph. (In the intervening decade since my dalliance, e-bike technology has come a long way. Given the weight on the front of the thing, however, speeds tend to remain slow.)

An increasing number of these cargo bikes are appearing on the streets these days, piloted either by smug yet very stressed parents or by delivery hipsters with ironic facial hair, retro clothing, flexible sexuality and a heavily-worn social conscience.

This means hell for motorists. If you drive in London, you’ll know what I mean. I write as a cyclist myself, a member of the Lycra lancers on the weekend and the Brompton battalion during the working week. My travels in central London are surprisingly pleasant, as in the past decade or so, cyclists have become kings of the road. Motorists – or most of them, at least – drive in the knowledge that they are of a second-class order when it comes to owning the highway. The swarms of bicycles that hoard along the margins, weave their way through stationary cars and accumulate in serried ranks in front of traffic lights are in charge. Drivers must fit in around them.

But I write also as a motorist. Screw a four-foot box to the front of your bicycle and the irritation caused to drivers is magnified manifold. Is it not enough that users of the combustion engine – which after all is a perfectly legal and legitimate method of transportation – have to cope with legions of suicidal cyclists of the non-cargo variety getting in the way at every turn? Must they now accommodate bicycles that take up the space of a car?

This is the first of my gripes. There are others. Chief of these is the use of the cargo bike for the school run. In my 2012 feature for the Sunday Telegraph, I lauded their ability to inspire my children to action. ‘If you have trouble getting the offspring dressed and out of the door in the morning, try promising them a ride on a cargo bike,’ I wrote. ‘They’ll dress themselves – ours did – and will be outside, cardigans on backwards and shoes on the wrong feet, baying for bike.’

Clearly, the concept of a novelty wearing off was lost on my younger self. More peeving, however, was my naive assumption that the things carried no risk. ‘These bikes feel very safe, as they are so eye-catching that motorists give you a wide berth (mainly, let it be said, to rubberneck),’ I breezed.

Looking back with the cynicism of age, I’m not sure this is entirely true. I remember an incident that didn’t make it into the feature: I was zooming down a hill in Winchester with three – no, four, as there a neighbour had got in on the action – children stuffed in the box at the front. They were howling with delight; I got carried away with the speed. A bump in the road sent them all two feet into the air. Thankfully, none of them were bounced out onto the road, but it gives one pause for thought. A German study suggested that seatbelts and helmets made cargo bikes safer, but I’m not so sure.

When you guide the contraption’s gondola into the traffic, the box with the children inside noses out first. Surely it would be very easy for a stressed-out motorist with limited visibility to shear it off one Monday morning. The words ‘accident’ and ‘waiting to happen’ come to mind.

Last year, a man called Triumph Okojie was riding an e-cargo bike with his two children, aged five and two, when they were hit by a car at a roundabout in Colchester. ‘The whole weight of the bike fell on my husband as he was thrown off it,’ his distraught wife Cristiana told the Daily Gazette. ‘They fell with their heads hitting the cement in the road.’ Luckily, there were no serious injuries. But did the family continue to use their cargo bike? Did they hell. ‘The children are now scared and don’t want to go near a bike. My husband is the same,’ Mrs Okojie said. ‘They are quite shocked.’

Not all accidents have such relatively happy endings. In the Netherlands, home of the bicycle, four children were killed and two adults injured when their cargo e-bike was hit by a train in the eastern city of Oss, near the German border.

As with most things in modern Britain, the frustration that underlies all this is political. Four wheels bad, two wheels good is a mantra of our age. The carbon consumption and pollution involved in producing e-bikes are rarely considered and safety concerns are pushed aside in our enthusiasm to feel good about ourselves. The reality is of secondary importance to political posturing. Screw the motorists. Screw the Tories. Let’s turn Britain into the country of the bicycle and to hell with everyone and everything else.

Jake Wallis Simons

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