Cargo bikes for personal transport: A user segmentation based on motivations for use

Building on the success of e-bikes, sales of e-cargo bikes are rapidly increasing in several countries. Cargo bikes fill an important gap in the urban transport market by combining the advantages of cycling with the greater transport capacity of a family car. Whereas most research on cargo bikes has focused on logistics, this paper addresses their use for personal transport. It is based on a large-scale survey in Switzerland among both proprietary cargo bike owners (CBO) and users of cargo bike sharing (CBS) (N = 955). A principal component analysis finds 3 families of motivations for using cargo bikes: transporting children, staying active, and reducing car use. Based on these 3 components, we use hierarchical clustering to identify 4 user segments: cargo transporters, enthusiasts, multimodals, and sustainable parents. Our results suggest that owned and shared cargo bikes are complementary and have the potential to attract new audiences to cycling and reduce car use. They could become a central component in a low-carbon/post-car urban mobility strategy. However, user experiences indicate that lacking safety, road infrastructure and parking provisions remain barriers to wider cargo bike use. We conclude by proposing a future research agenda for cargo bike research.