The opening up of New York City as a market for larger cargo e-bikes could present a massive opportunity for start-ups on the other side of the Atlantic.
That’s according to Vok Bikes, an Estonian e-bike maker that is keeping a close eye on potential changes to road rules in New York around cargo bikes.
Siim Starke, co-founder and product lead, said that while the young start-up, which makes four-wheel electric cargo bikes for last-mile delivery, is currently serving the European market, it is keen to enter the U.S. market eventually.
City officials in New York recently held a hearing to thrash out possible changes to rules in the city that would allow for four-wheel bikes, like the ones made by Vok, to be used in cycle lanes. The four-wheelers are used by delivery and logistics companies to carry out last-mile deliveries rather than trucks and vans.
Makers of these bikes tout them as greener options that will help reduce congestion.
“An interesting market that will open up soon is New York. They are [potentially] allowing four-wheel bikes on the bike lanes, before they were banned or they didn’t count as bicycles and they’re also putting huge charges on congestion for vans,” Starke said.
New York, like several other major cities, has introduced congestion charges to try and stem emissions.
Cargo e-bikes are appealing to businesses in large cities that need to move goods around daily, Starke said.
“If you’re a business owner, let’s say a laundry service and you have X amount of laundry that you need to deliver to other businesses daily and have a bunch of vans going in and out of the city and every day you need to pay [congestion charges], that’s quite huge. That’s making the companies think OK, what are the other options?”
Current rules in New York don’t allow for four-wheel bikes and place restrictions on how wide a bike and its cargo can be if it is to use a bike lane. This is not the first time that New York has tinkered with cargo bike rules. The city’s Department of Transport launched the Commercial Cargo Bike Pilot program in late 2019 for parcel delivery couriers.
Vok, which raised €3.8 million ($4 million) in funding earlier this year, is a smaller player in the scene but New York opening up as a viable market for it and other e-bike start-ups in Europe would be significant in their efforts to enter the U.S. market.
Currently Vok’s biggest markets are the U.K., Germany and its native Estonia where the national mail service is using its bikes in part of its fleet.
In the meantime, the company plans to ramp up its business in the U.K. where it is eyeing a bid to provide the Royal Mail with cargo bikes.
Starke said that Vok’s customers are primarily postal services and delivery businesses.
“They’re all searching for solutions to become greener and some are doing it for the image and others really do care. There are companies who really see the benefits of it after testing [the bikes],” he said.
“Usually they start with a few. We have been lucky in that all the clients we have managed to get, they are ordering more after having it for one year. They’re ordering more and slowly growing and then there are large companies who are also in a phase of switching their logistics to more cargo bikes.”
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