Kevin Dekkinga rides his cargo bike with sons Willem, 10, left, and Pouwel, 7, along Eddy Street in Chicago on July 3. Antonio Perez/Tribune
By Sarah Freishtat Chicago Tribune
Kevin Dekkinga’s son was going to elementary school and the family faced a decision: buy a second car, or buy a new cargo bike.
His son would attend a Chicago Public Schools magnet school in a different neighborhood. His wife worked in the suburbs. And with CPS facing a bus driver shortage after the pandemic that left school bus service uncertain, the family felt they needed another reliable option to get around.
Dekkinga’s dilemma marked a quintessential issue for families: with more people in the household going more places, parents need a dependable way to get to work, run errands and get their kids to school and activities. For many, upgrading the family car seems a logical option.
But Dekkinga chose a second cargo bike, this one with electric assist. He has racked up miles in the years since, and in the last year he estimates he put more miles on the bike than on the family car, taking his sons from their Avondale home to school in Lakeview or to their two separate summer camps. He makes grocery runs. He hauls home 50-pound bags of feed for the backyard chickens.
Cyclists commuting to work, school, social outings and errands have become an increasingly common sight in Chicago, as bike use has skyrocketed in the city since the onset of the pandemic. Another increasingly common sight are cyclists toting children and other supplies in the large buckets that extend from their cargo bikes or on carriers overtop of the back wheels.
For these parents, a cargo bike is the family vehicle of choice. While for some, loading a child into a car can seem like the fastest, most convenient and safest option to get around, cargo-bike parents say the bikes offer the ability to avoid increasingly bad traffic and make travel around the city more pleasant and accessible.
Boosting biking is a goal of the city, and advocates say cargo bikes solve one of the limitations often cited by would-be cyclists by providing an option to haul goods and people. They effectively make bikes a feasible alternative to cars for those able to pedal.
But cargo bikes have their own limitations. They can cost thousands of dollars. Families need space to store the vehicles, which can be too heavy to carry up and down steps. Then there’s the need for a safe place to park the vehicle at the other end of the ride, where locking up to a lamppost might be an unappealing option.
Advocates and riders say adding more bike lanes, improving existing ones and creating bikeable routes that extend across neighborhoods could convince more people to ride.
Still, interest in cargo bikes has grown nationwide, especially those that give riders an electric assist. Through April, sales of new electric cargo bikes were up 125% over the same period in 2022, with 6,915 sold, according to market research data provided by advocacy group PeopleForBikes.
In Chicago, a recent study on biking from the Chicago Department of Transportation and the companies Replica and Sam Schwartz found bike trips for shopping had more than doubled from 2019 to 2023, and the number of households without cars had more than tripled.
One of those households includes Zachary Welden, Chuyi Wen and their two children. But they weren’t always car-free.
They had long wanted to use cars less, but it wasn’t easy when they lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Chicago — flat, dense, more affordable than other cities — seemed like the right place for them to be less dependent on cars.
Shortly after they moved in February, they bought an e-cargo bike. Then they bought more bikes. They sold their car. They bought another e-cargo bike.
Wen was at first skeptical of the car-free lifestyle they were pursuing, and figured she would rely heavily on public transit and walking. But her expectations quickly changed, she said. About a week after buying their first cargo bike, she was ready to sell the car.
The family now rides from their Lakeview home to Chinatown, beaches in Uptown and Edgewater, and soccer practice. Their 4-year-old daughter sometimes rides her own bike, and sometimes rides in the bucket of the cargo bike with their 2-year-old son. Wen’s mom joins them, too, and for trips too long for her to cycle herself she rides on the back of the family’s longtail e-bike, which has seating over the back wheel.
Wen and Welden sometimes hop in a taxi if it’s late at night and they’re in an area with many bars, but mostly find riding a bike is faster than driving in traffic or walking to the CTA and waiting for a bus or train, Wen said. Taking the bike is less exhausting for the kids and for Wen than toting them around on the CTA, and provides freedom for Wen’s mom, who doesn’t drive.
There’s also no circling the block five times looking for a parking spot and ending up blocks away. There’s no fighting to get upset kids into a car seat.
“Life, strangely enough — though not intuitively — is so much easier on a bike than it is in a car when you have kids,” Welden said. “Which may seem like a crazy thing to say, but once you live the life of being a cyclist family, it is much easier.”
Welden, in the back of his mind, thinks about what might happen if there is a crash. He’s encountered cars parked in the bike lane, cars refusing to share the road and impatient drivers. Even, occasionally, outright mean drivers.
But it seems to him drivers give the cargo bike more deference than they do traditional bikes, and he ultimately thinks it’s safer for the kids to be in a bike than a car.
Welden and Wen estimate they spent about $14,000 on the two e-cargo bikes. But they sold their Subaru SUV for $33,000, more than covering the cost.
Dekkinga, who works for bike advocacy organization the League of American Bicyclists, said his second, electric cargo bike cost $7,000 when he bought it during the pandemic. But when he added up the costs of buying a second car — gas, insurance, maintenance and the hassle of driving and parking — getting a second bike instead was the clear choice.
The weather can be challenging, he said, but he has a rain cover for the cargo bike and stocked up on weather-appropriate apparel. For really bad weather days or trips to the suburbs, he has public transit or the car to fall back on.
“I feel like when I am riding a bike I am making the city a safer and more connected place, and more resilient place for everyone,” he said.
He bought his first cargo bike, which did not have electric assist, about 10 years ago, excited to cycle around the city with his newborn kid, he said. At the time, he felt like he was one of the only people with such a vehicle.
Jon Lind, owner of J.C. Lind Bike Co. in Old Town, said he has seen the popularity of cargo bikes grow since he began selling them 16 years ago. Manufacturers are making a wider variety of options, and used cargo bikes are becoming more available at sometimes cheaper prices.
A game-changer, though, has been the advent of electric cargo bikes in recent years. Electric pedal assist makes moving a heavy bike loaded down with children and supplies less daunting, and more apealing to riders who might be dropping their kids off on the way to the office and don’t want to show up to work sweaty, he said.
Some of his customers have no cars, but most are looking to supplement one family car with a cargo bike, he said.
“They just do not care to be in a car in the city as much as possible,” he said. “They see the bike as more relaxing and enjoyable and just a more convenient and practical way to get from point A to point B in the city.”
The popularity has extended to shops that don’t specialize in cargo bikes, too. Small Shop in Bronzeville began selling larger e-cargo bikes made by Radio Flyer last year, and has sold a handful, owner Chris Willard said.
The bike shop specializes in bikes under $600, so family-oriented cargo bikes are outside their typical focus, he said. But Radio Flyer is a local company and Small Shop can now stock parts to service e-cargo bikes that were for years hard to come by, which made selling the product more appealing, Willard said.
“I do think that there’s an interest in commuting by bike as a group, as a family,” he said.
Rebecca Resman, who founded the group Chicago Family Biking, said in her early days on a cargo bike, she knew nearly everyone else she spotted on the street with a similar bike. Now she passes people in cargo bikes she doesn’t recognize.
And more growth is likely as cargo bikes full of children become a more common sight on the city’s streets, she said. Families rolling by are a compelling vision to drivers behind the wheel.
“It stinks to be in a car with your kids stuck in traffic,” she said.
Resman’s family used to be car-free, but broke down and got a car to supplement the cargo bike during the pandemic, when they felt like the CTA was a less reliable option. Her kids also got involved in activities farther from home as they got older, and Resman’s cargo bike doesn’t have an electric assist, making covering the distance while carrying children more challenging.
But owning a car doesn’t mean a family can’t be a biking family, she said. And cargo carriers are especially important to open up options for biking for women, who are often responsible for the majority of child transport, she said.
“Cargo bikes help you choose biking more as a family, and at younger ages,” she said. “And that’s really exciting, especially in a place like Chicago where we have so many public spaces that are so fabulous for families to go explore.”
Clare Fauke and her husband took their kids exploring on cargo bikes when they were little. Though the kids have outgrown the bikes, they plan to keep one to make grocery trips and run errands.
They have two nonelectric cargo bikes, one they bought when two of their kids were toddlers, more than 10 years ago, and the other when they bought a house with more storage space. By then their kids were older and less likely to fall asleep in transit, and they could ride on the back of a longtail, sitting over the back wheel either strapped into a baby seat or buckled in with a seatbelt.
They’d take the bikes to the beach from their Logan Square home, piling the kids, towels and chairs into the bike and heading east down The 606 trail. They’d explore parks and pools around the city that didn’t have parking lots. And when the kids got tired they could head home, no need to wait for the bus.
“People (in cars) get excited when they see us,” she said. “And it’s always fun for the kids too.”
Fauke and her husband use a car-sharing app for trips to the suburbs, the Indiana Dunes or to go camping. Trips to visit her father-in-law on the Southwest Side are also rarely made by bike, she said.
Though not prohibitively far, they’ve found it hard to find routes that will take them the length of their journey. Many bike lanes, and sometimes entire streets, have gaps through industrial areas on the way and over I-290, she said.
“I would love to see the city address that,” she said. “Because being in one neighborhood is fine, but trying to get from one neighborhood to the other in different parts of the city can be tricky.
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