I bought a cargo bike for the school run – and it has saved me thousands

It’s sometimes mistaken for an ice cream cart, but my giant electric tricycle is a serious vehicle that can carry an entire family

I only bought a cargo bike to do the school run but now, seven years on, I use it for everything. I use it to carry the dog to the park, I put the weekly supermarket shop in it, and sometimes I get my husband to chauffeur me in it when he and I go to the pub. 
It’s made living in the city a thousand times more pleasant. There are no parking tickets, no Ulez issues, no traffic jams. They’re immune to the sky-rocketing costs hammering car ownership (where insurance premiums have risen from an average of £613 to a record high of £892 in just 12 months, say Compare the Market, while the price of fuel is 20p more expensive than four years ago, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine).
When people marvel that I’m fit enough to pedal four children about town, I reluctantly disclose the small matter of the motor; the bike looks old fashioned but, thanks to the massive battery on the back, I never break sweat, even when I’m faced with the toughest hill.
For many years there were just a couple of parents who took their children to school on a cargo bike, and at the time it felt a bit eccentric. Now there is a fleet of cargo bikes in every shape and size surrounding every school in the area. Some are large-box trikes like mine, which can accommodate four or five children, while others are sleek two-wheelers with two children in tandem behind the driver. James Middleton, the Princess of Wales’s brother, has one for his dogs, while, in the States, actresses Jessica Alba and Blake Lively have joined the cargo bike club. We are now a two-cargo-bike family; my husband commutes to work on a Tern GSD cargo bike that can take two children on the back.
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According to Dan Parsons, founder of e-bike retailer Fully Charged, cargo bikes became a craze during lockdown and now they can’t stock enough. “They’re a healthy and fun way to get about – and they’re so much greener than a car,” he says. Indeed our Volvo sits unloved in the drive, even when it’s pouring with rain, as the journey to school is 10 minutes quicker on the bike and I can drop the children directly into the playground rather than struggling to find a parking space in the nearby streets. 
Speak to any parent with an electric cargo bike and they’ll evangelise about how happy their children are when they’re riding in it. Mine can be fighting or stressing about an impending maths test, yet once they’re squashed up in the bike, with the fresh air in their face, they relax. Sometimes they read The Beano or a book and the three-year-old insists on holding a toy. But most of the time they just look out at the world in their own thoughts. 
Lucy Woodhouse, co-founder of cargo bike supplier Cargo Bike London (@CARGOBIKELONDON), finds that the door-to-door nature of travelling by cargo bike has opened up the city to her family, avoiding all the hassle of public transport.  
“We can park up outside Battersea Power Station for shopping after school or visit one of the museums,” she says. “When I took my son to a Chelsea game we stopped right outside, dodging all the traffic.” 
Charlotte Duff, who set up the company with Lucy when they discovered a gap in the market for entry-level cargo bikes, remembers lifting the children into her bike on the day the Queen died and pedalling over to Buckingham Palace. “The atmosphere was unforgettable – we’d never have been able to do that by car.” 
To the uninitiated it probably sounds a bit dangerous, with so many children and school bags crammed into a bike, but mine has seat belts for everyone and I comfort myself that the bike is a big presence on the road. Parsons believes that cycling in cities is safer these days with the advent of dedicated cycle lanes, which are only getting wider. Plus, the Highway Code was changed last year giving priority to the cyclist, which has also made a difference to cycling safety, he says. 
Roman Magula, director of London Green Cycles, one of Britain’s most established cargo bike shops, believes the number of cyclists on the road has also made cycling safer. “Bikes are an accepted presence,” he says. “Many drivers now cycle themselves so are more sympathetic; there’s been a generational shift.” 
While I’ve saved thousands in fuel since I joined the cargo bike club, I confess it wasn’t cheap to join. At the time there were few brands around, so I went for a Christiania trike, which is manufactured by a family-owned company in Denmark. It cost around £3,750, which at the time felt crazy – buying a bike that cost the same as a small second-hand car.
But it’s still going strong after seven years and the running costs are a fraction of what they would be for a motor vehicle. Nowadays there are finance options to help parents afford cargo bikes and if your company offers the Cycle To Work scheme, you can benefit from a 32 per cent discount on your cargo bike and monthly payments of a couple of hundred pounds. 
There are also cheaper brands hitting the market: Cargo Bike London, for example, sells customisable Amcargobikes from Denmark, while there are versions by Raleigh and Decathlon. 
“I found the cost of buying an electric cargo bike so prohibitively expensive that I ended up importing a cheaper one from Denmark,” says Charlotte Duff, co-founder of Cargo Bike London. “After three years of successfully road-testing it for quality with my children, we decided to make them available to more families in the UK.”  
At £2,500, Amcargobikes are still a sizeable outlay but they’re more affordable than the Load 75 by Riese and Muller, the Bentley or Rolls-Royce of cargo bikes, which costs up to £10,000 with accessories. For those on a budget, there’s also a flourishing second-hand market: my husband now commutes to work on a Tern GSD cargo bike that we found on Facebook marketplace – it can take two children on the back if necessary. 
Of course there’s a limit to how long your children will enjoy being pedalled around by you. I’ve noticed that one fellow cargo biker has taken to leaving her bike a safe distance away from the school gates to save her 12-year-old son from embarrassment. My eldest is 11 and, while he doesn’t yet complain about travelling in the bike, he is getting a bit tall. Thankfully, on cue, Christiania has brought out a taller rain hood, ensuring we can still travel when it’s wet. 
How many children you can carry, and until what age, depends on a bike’s payload. A Christiania such as mine can take 100kg, for example, while the Tern Short Haul – Tern’s entry-level cargo bike, which costs around £1,100 – can take a more modest 50kg. Babies can travel in a car seat or designated baby seat in a box cargo bike from as young as three months (although I always thought this seemed a bit young) while child seats for children from six months can be fitted to most cargo bikes.  
Extra seats and their fittings all add to the cost. It’s essential to factor in the accessories you’ll need, including rain covers and lights, or you’ll never use it. Some of the two-wheeler cargo bikes have a cube-style rain cover that fits over the seat on the back of the bike, like the Popemobile. You also need proper waterproofs for yourself – my cycling poncho from Otto London, which loops over my wrists to protect my legs from the rain, gives me no excuse to be a fair-weather cyclist. Warm gloves are essential: I’ve found that none of the cycling gloves are up to mid-winter cycling and have taken to wearing ski mittens instead. 
Apart from the cost, the biggest downside of cargo bike ownership is theft. If it’s not your bike they’re taking, it’s your speedometer, or your lights, which all have a value on eBay. Ours is chained up outside the house and we’ve had someone smash off the back rack to steal the battery, which had been locked on. He also destroyed our magnolia tree in the process. It was all caught on our CCTV – so much for it being a deterrent. 
If you don’t have anywhere to lock up your bike by your house or you’re too nervous to leave it outside, Parsons suggests choosing one that can be stored inside: our Tern can be folded and flipped vertically to fit in a cupboard. If they must be left on the street, a heavy chain lock is essential, Magula says, although he refuses to believe lock companies who profess their chains are indestructible – thieves will always find a way in the end, which means you need to invest in a range of other deterrents, such as motion alarms and CCTV. He also recommends investing in a GPS tracker. 
I don’t know what I’d do if our Christiania got stolen. When we go on holiday I insist on carrying it into the hallway, and even then I worry about it getting taken. If I were sensible, I’d  upgrade it to the long wheel version – I’ve got so many children and they’re only getting bigger. Yet I feel pathetically nostalgic about my red and cream bike – as Woodhouse puts it, you make so many memories on those journeys. Magula concedes that it’s perfectly normal to develop attachment issues with one’s cargo bike.
“I regularly come across families with grown-up children who are so attached to their cargo bike that they can’t sell it,” he says. “They tell themselves that it’ll always come in handy in certain situations – which it will.” 
Cargo bikes come in all shapes and sizes, but there are three main formats that most family buyers tend to choose from – front-loaders, rear-loaders and trikes.
Each type comes with its own advantages and disadvantages. Trikes are inherently stable, but lack the manoeuvrability of a rear-loader. Rear-loaders ride more like regular bikes, but you can’t keep an eye on your “load” like you can with a front-loader. And front-loaders are great for kids – but can take a bit of getting used to.
The cheapest cargo bikes start at around £1,500, but unless you’re from the Netherlands you’re better off buying a slightly more expensive e-cargo bike, which will give you a boost on hills and faster roads. These start at around £2,000, but can cost as much as a small car if you want the latest and greatest. E-bikes bought from a reputable retailer will be road legal and can be ridden without a licence – though insurance against theft is recommended.
One of the more common cargo bikes is the Tern GSD – a particularly sophisticated example of the rear-loader breed. With enough space for an adult rider and two small children, it’s an extremely popular machine for school run mums who want to ditch the car, although it’s a bit less practical for load-lugging than more barrow-shaped models. You get an electric motor, a comfortable seat for everyone, a sturdy frame and a low-maintenance belt drive system, but it comes at a price -– expect to spend around £6,000 on one of these.
Named after a particularly flat part of Copenhagen, the Christiania Classic trike is available without electric assist for around £1,500, but most UK buyers would be wise to choose one with a battery and a motor for around the same again. These bikes are commonplace in the Netherlands and their native Denmark and increasingly appeal to larger families in Britain – you can fit more kids into the largest Christiania bikes than any normal front- or rear-loader. The UK’s bike infrastructure sometimes poses problems for wider bikes like these, though.
Combining the manoeuvrability of a normal honest-to-goodness bicycle with the practicality of a wheelbarrow, the £4,299 Stride 2 from British manufacturer Raleigh is useful for transporting a pair of very small children or one slightly larger one. Front-loaders like this are popular with parents whose children require supervision, or for anyone who plans to transport an animal, but – in testing for The Telegraph – the Stride 2 proved particularly helpful for errands. The bike is narrow enough to easily cycle between bollards, and capacious enough for a weekly shop.