Absolutely Sameday riders on electric cargobikes
Fully Charged
“Our van drivers are averaging between 10 and 12 deliveries a day while the e-cargobike riders can do more than 30 deliveries a day,” said Doug Hutchinson, Head of Absolutely Sameday, a Central London courier firm.
The Absolutely group of courier companies was founded in 1865 by George Thompson, a station master at St Pancras station. The group is today run by his great grandson Jeremy Thompson.
Absolutely has been using cargobikes since the 1880s.
Absolutely
“If you look at traffic speeds in London, it is traveling at the same speed it was in 1880, when it was horses and carts,” Thompson told Fleet News last year.
Bicycles come into their own when motor vehicles are often unable to get through clogged city streets so Absolutely has invested in a fleet of e-cargobikes, supplied through London e-bike shop Fully Charged.
Hutchinson was a London cycle courier in the 1980s, riding while he was completing a degree in psychology. He’s therefore not surprised that bikes are so efficient at cutting through London’s traffic.
“We were struggling to maintain a service level in London,” he said.
“We were finding that recruiting van drivers were becoming more difficult and once we actually got them out on the road they were clogged up in traffic, getting parking tickets, and finding it difficult to drive around the city. Cargo bikes can collect the same number of parcels and carry more or less the same capacity as one of our small vans.”
Cargobikes are zero emission, don’t attract the London congestion charge, and riders don’t get parking or speeding fines.
“Electric cargobikes are most definitely the future for us,” concluded Hutchinson, who said “absolutely” would soon be investing in a further ten Urban Arrow electric cargo bikes.
Quicker by bike than van in Amsterdam
Google Maps/Carlton Reid
Known in the logistics industry as LEFVs–or light electric freight vehicles—e-cargobikes have electric pedal assistance and can be ridden on roads and on cycleways.
E-cargobikes can weave through gridlocked motor traffic, and can often be wheeled into drop-off destinations rather than parking illegally, a problem endemic to van deliveries. According to research by the municipality of Amsterdam, the average loading and unloading time for delivery vans and lorries is 12 minutes–the same amount of freight can be unloaded from an e-cargobike in as little as three minutes.
