Ask any bike advocate how to fix any problem, and the answer comes quickly: more bikes.
When it comes to freeing up Seattle’s valuable curb space, chipping away at its entrenched congestion and meeting its oft-repeated goal of reducing harmful greenhouse gases, the bicyclists may be right.
The Seattle Department of Transportation is considering new rules for electric cargo bikes, an effort it says will do all of the above, and more. In a city saturated with delivery vehicles and with little extra space, e-cargo bikes — which can carry upward of 800 pounds — may supply the last-mile delivery for the smaller parcels that come to our homes at nearly any time of day, reducing the number of larger delivery trucks on the street.
SDOT officials say greater use of e-cargo bikes could also speed up downtown deliveries, considering that 80% of commercial buildings in the city core rely on curbside deliveries. Their use could also make a dent in the city’s carbon emissions, 58% of which comes from tailpipes, freight trucks the dirtiest among them.
“The big crux of this is supporting our climate goals,” said Katherine Rice, who helped devise Seattle’s e-cargo bike program as SDOT’s electrification program manager, pointing to the city’s 2030 goal of 30% of deliveries being done by clean vehicles.
The new regulations and permits for the bikes must still be approved by the City Council, which is scheduled to vote on the program Tuesday, and are expected to be in place by the end of the year. The proposal as it stands is similar to one adopted last year in New York City, the first major American city to authorize e-cargo bikes for delivery and freight.
Boston and Washington, D.C., are also considering adopting rules that mirror those in New York.
As in those cities, Seattle would authorize deliveries on electric bikes with two, three and four wheels. The bikes can be no wider than 4 feet, allowing them to ride in Seattle’s bike lanes, which are typically 5 feet wide, and would be limited to 15 mph or less.
The ordinance also would redefine where cargo bikes with a valid permit can load and unload goods without additional cost, like in paid parking spots and neighborhoods with permit parking and time-limited areas. Many spots will be open to the bikes, but commercial, truck and passenger loading zones will remain off-limits.
Any licensed business can get a $100 e-cargo bike permit, which must be displayed on the bike, or a trailer pulled by a bike.
The city expects about 100 e-cargo bikes to be in use during the program’s first year, a number that it anticipates will grow to 500 by 2030.
Giacomo Dalla Chiara, a research engineer at the University of Washington’s Urban Freight Lab, said the program is a good first step that could help smaller businesses adopt the technology. But he said more needs to be done to spur adoption by established companies like Amazon and UPS — namely, building a bigger and better connected network of safe bikeways with the notion that a robust bike network would help larger companies see the benefit of cargo bikes.
“We still have huge highways, huge streets and not much infrastructure to support cargo bikes,” he said. “Bikes are at a disadvantage, but it’s an artificial disadvantage because our systems are made for cars.”
A better bikeway network would also help the city avoid some of the pitfalls Dalla Chiara identified in a 2023 research paper published in the scholarly journal Transportation Research that collected and analyzed detailed data on the driving and parking behavior of Seattle-based cargo bike riders.