Freight Bicycle - Common Uses

Common Uses

• Delivery services in dense urban environments
• Food vending in high foot traffic areas (including specialist ice cream bikes)
• Transporting trade tools, including around large installations such as power stations and CERN
• Airport cargo handling
• Recycling collections
• Warehouse inventory transportation
• Mail (The UK post office operates a fleet of 33,000 bicycles, mainly the Pashley MailStar)
• Food collection,
• Child transport; it is estimated that 90% of the freight bicycles sold in Amsterdam are used primarily to carry children.

In Amsterdam it is common to rent a worktrike to move one's belongings, have a party in a park or promote a new product. Furniture retailer IKEA is also testing a freight bike rental program to allow residents of Copenhagen to transport new purchases.

Because of the strong economic advantages realizable by widespread proliferation of freight bicycles, Oxfam has designed the OxTrike and established local production at community workshops in non-industrialized countries for use in non-industrialized countries worldwide. Dangdang, China’s biggest online bookseller, uses 30 bicycle courier companies in 12 cities to deliver goods and collect payments. Karaba, a free-trade coffee co-op in Rwanda, uses 400 modified bicycles to carry hundreds of pounds of coffee beans to be processed.