Shared e-cargo bike service goes beyond Dutch borders

Electric shared cargo bikes are transforming urban transportation by providing a sustainable and practical solution for moving around town with kids, groceries, goods and even adults in the front. These bikes, designed to carry heavy loads with ease, are becoming a popular choice in cities around the world.  

As more communities recognise the benefits of reducing traffic congestion and carbon emissions, the adoption of shared cargo bikes is rapidly expanding. This shift is also fostering greater accessibility and convenience for urban dwellers, making it easier to live and shop locally without the need for a car.  

We sat down with Cargoroo’s co-founder Jaron Borensztajn to discuss the potential of shared cargo bikes and how Cargoroo entered the market in Lyon, France and Berlin, Germany. 

This year, the Dutch Cycling Embassy celebrates its 12.5-year anniversary. To document and celebrate the global impact the DCE and our network has had over that period, we are highlighting multiple projects. This article is part of the series #DCELegacy.  

Are shared cargo bikes the future of urban transportation? 

Shared cargo bikes are the easiest way to replace cars. 

Almost every European city now has a policy of reducing the number of cars in the city because of congestion, pollution, etc. There are several groups that need an alternative to the car if you limit the use of the car. There are obvious groups like a family with children running around with three kids in the city. If you don’t have a car, there’s not many alternatives. And for many of those use cases, the cargo bike is the only alternative if you don’t want to use a car. You see that in the policy of several cities. They recognise that cargo bikes are one of the few shared mobility modes where they see only positives. 

There is lots of discussions about mopeds, kick scooters, etc. Several cities ban kick scooters because they think it’s littering the city and it causes a lot of hinderance for other groups. The only mode of shared mobility where all cities think it’s only a positive is shared cargo bikes because they see that it lowers the amount of car trips in the city, and it gives people an alternative. So, if you take away people’s car, you should be able to offer them an alternative. With kick scooters and mopeds, you have only an alternative for individual people that didn’t need a car. With a cargo bike, you have an alternative for people wanting to do shopping, wanting to move stuff, and wanting to go around with their kids. 

Why did Cargoroo expand beyond the Dutch borders? 

The Netherlands is a very bike-friendly country. But in terms of size, there are only three big cities in the Netherlands. And even those big cities are not big. So, the scale in the Netherlands that you can achieve is rather limited. And that means for us as a shared cargo bike operator, it was necessary to look abroad beyond the Netherlands. And that’s what we started doing almost immediately. That’s why we made contact with the Dutch Cycling Embassy (DCE) already very early and went to all kinds of fairs and exhibitions together. And I think it was very successful in getting us the exposure that we got. It is one of the reasons why we are recognised now as the leading European shared cargo bike operator. 

Cargoroo is successfully running in Berlin. Can you tell us more about it?

We started in Berlin two years ago [in 2022] with a small scale operation of just under 100 bikes, and that was going quite well. We see Berlin as one of the more bike-friendly cities, and Germany in general is very bike-friendly. There was a significant increase in bike infrastructure in Berlin after COVID.

We saw a big uptake in bike usage, so we decided to bet heavily on Berlin. Last year, we scaled up from 100 to 350 bikes, which was a gamble that initially proved painful because the first year’s usage was less than we hoped for, costing us a lot of money. However, now, one year later, we see that usage has doubled compared to last year. You need patience and more money, but then it will work. We are quite happy with how it’s going now in Berlin. We have a lot of enthusiastic users, and you see many of the bikes being used.

I often get feedback from people who visit Berlin and say they used our bikes and had a great experience. It’s funny because they recognize the bikes and know how they work. Berlin is a much more spread-out city than Amsterdam or Utrecht, so it poses some operational challenges. But it also means there’s potential to scale up to a larger scale and make it more economically feasible.

In March 2023, Cargoroo entered the streets of Lyon. How did it go? 

Via the DCE, we had the chance to pitch our shared cargo bikes to the city of Lyon at an event in the Hague. The city of Lyon was impressed so they invited us to come to their city to talk to them about a plan for how we could do a pilot in Lyon. 

It took some time and internal deliberations in Lyon about how to do it. There were several neighborhoods in Lyon who all wanted a cargo bike, but they had limited budgets so what they did was spread the bikes across several areas where we did have some discussions because we think density is important. It ended up being a compromise project, as we also partnered with an operational partner of the city of Lyon, JCDecaux, a partner that operates their current shared normal bike fleet. That cooperation went quite well so we started in March of 2023 with 20 bikes. It got very positive exposure, people were very enthusiastic, and there was plenty of interest. There was also a lot of visibility because the city made a lot of effort in creating nice places to put the cargo bikes by painting the surface and making signs.  

What was less good is that in the first week we had around six theft attempts, and that was a surprise. Not for the people in Lyon, but it was a surprise for us. With the help of JCDecaux we found all the bikes, but there was some vandalism. 

I think there was good usage in Lyon but not on a level that made it commercially viable yet and that was kind of expected because you need a longer time for people to start changing their habits. Everywhere we start it takes around one to two years to get to a level of sustainable revenue and also you need a certain scale in which actually 20 bikes is quite small. 

What was the missing ingredient for Cargoroo’s success in Lyon? 

I think with more time and a bit more scale it could be a truly succesful pilot. It was a good experiment to see what would happen, and people were using the bikes. 

The e-cargo bikes were integrated into the JCDecaux app, the Vélo’V bike share system. However, this integration made it difficult for users to locate the cargo bikes. With over 7,000 regular bikes in the system and only 20 cargo bikes, they were hard to find in the app unless users specifically knew about them. Improving visibility by separately showing the cargo bikes would have helped. Despite these challenges, we and JCDecaux did a good job overall.  

 In Lyon, the regular shared bikes are used quite a lot, and there is political will to promote cycling. However, like everywhere, there are financial challenges, so they decided to discontinue the pilot due to economic reasons, which is a pity. For us, launching in in a French city without a city subsidy is difficult at this point because the investments are too high for a small player like us. We may relaunch in Lyon later when there is more funding available from either investors or the city.  

The pilot was good as a showcase, and I think many people saw it. It did prove that there is a market for cargo bikes, but it needs either more money or more time, and that will certainly happen. It’s a matter of which will come first, I guess. 

How is operating in Berlin different than in Lyon? 

Berlin is a cycling city. You don’t need to explain to people in Berlin what the use of a cargo bike is. So I think they were a bit further in that respect than France, for example. But I’m sure France will also come. 

It’s just a matter of time. And maybe France is a year behind Germany and will eventually also come. You see a lot of things happening in Paris, for example. What we see in France is there are some challenges with vandalism, not only for bikes, but also for shared cars, etc. There were several operators that retracted from Paris because of severe vandalism. So that’s quite a risk as a small operator because you can’t afford multiple bikes being vandalized, stolen, etc. 

You do see there’s quite a big relation between the support from the city and the politics in the level of success for bike share and cargo bikes in city. And I think it’s very important if a city supports infrastructure, shared bikes, especially if they give some support to operators. 

And on a neighborhood level people are very enthusiastic about bikes. Also, the structure of the city politics is such that in Berlin, things are not so centralized. Decisions are made on a neighborhood level, which makes it sometimes difficult because you must ask permission in every separate neighborhood to put your bikes. 

What can the Dutch learn from Lyon and Berlin? 

I think one very positive aspect, is Berlin’s clarity about parking spaces. In Berlin, they make parking spaces available for shared mobility and shared cargo bikes, whereas in Dutch cities, that’s always a very difficult subject.  

In many cities, cargo bikes have to be placed on the pavement where pedestrians walk, which is not ideal. In Berlin, they make it easy. They say, “OK, you want to put your cargo bike here? Here’s two parking spaces for cars; we’ll convert them to parking spaces for cargo bikes.” This approach greatly reduces congestion on the sidewalks. 

In the Netherlands, converting parking spaces is a politically difficult subject. In Berlin, they handle it quite easily. The same goes for France. In Lyon, the cargo bikes were not on the pavement but in former car parking spaces converted for cargo bike use.