Parcel deliverers will soon have the biggest calves in town. While the numbers continue to tout the benefits of bicycle infrastructure for neighborhood business development, major delivery companies see the electric cargo bike as a means of urban transportation superior in every way to large diesel-powered trucks. Montreal is preparing to make more room for them.
Montreal inaugurated earlier this spring the second version of a pilot project called Colibri, the aim of which was to transform the bus station on Berri Street into a transshipment zone to replace delivery trucks with zero-emission vehicles. , including bicycles. The City says it has thus enabled, in 2021 alone, the “decarbonized delivery” of some 260,000 packages to certain streets in central Montreal. The objective of the Colibri 2.0 project is to increase this number to 500,000 packages by 2023.
These are hundreds of tons of CO2 emissions avoided annually. These are tens of thousands of kilometers less traveled by trucks on the streets of the metropolis. Heavy transport, as we know, participates more often than not in accidents involving cyclists and pedestrians.
“At the moment, the objective is to reproduce this project everywhere on the territory of the city”, explains to the To have to Sophie Mauzerolle, responsible for active transportation and mobility on the executive committee of the City of Montreal. “Obviously, this will require substantial infrastructure. We want to put everything in place to promote this type of urban logistics. »
Another novelty, these days: private companies are taking a close interest in the possibility of delivering bicycles almost everywhere in town. Already, Purolator was involved in the Colibri project. But other big international names are knocking on the door, assures Mme Mauzerolle. “We are in discussion with several international players. There are particular challenges in Montreal, such as the winter weather. But Colibri showed that the season did not really have a major impact. »
Cycling 364 and a half days a year
There is no season for cycling. Even when dragging a trailer loaded with almost 150 kilos of parcels. “We deliver by bike 365 days a year. Even in winter. There were only a few hours during the winter when we were unable to deliver by bike,” summarizes Clément Sabourin, co-founder of the Courant Plus delivery company. The Montreal start-up relies on trucks and electric mounts to ensure carbon-free delivery of parcels where possible.
Montreal certainly wants to open up to delivery by cargo bike, believes Clément Sabourin, and progress has been made in this direction over the past three years. But there is still work to be done to harmonize all sustainable mobility initiatives, he notes. From one pedestrian street to another, the rules are not the same for circulation by bicycle and, in some cases, they make it impossible to deliver on two wheels.
“On some streets, we could have fines for having delivered by bicycle. The pedestrianization of commercial arteries includes provisions for delivery, but in fact, each street has its own criteria, and that does not help to deploy our bikes everywhere. The City says it is working with the commercial development corporations (SDC) to harmonize everything.
Montreal also wants to involve other municipalities in the project. “The Planning and Mobility Commission is working on a freight forwarding mandate that involves the metropolitan community. We feel a craze throughout the Union of Quebec Municipalities, too,” says Sophie Mauzerolle.
Cycling and trade go hand in hand
It seems increasingly understood that the space taken up by bicycles in the city is not at the expense of traders. The Montreal organization Vélo Québec has just published the results of a comparative study of commercial activity between January 2019 and September 2021 on Saint-Denis Street, where the Réseau express vélo (REV) is located, and that of Saint-Denis Boulevard. -Laurent, where there is no equivalent cycling infrastructure.
The study tends to show that the merchants of rue Saint-Denis weathered the pandemic better than their counterparts located a few streets further west: their traffic rate had returned, last fall, to its level of the beginning of 2019 , whereas it is only about three quarters of what it was in January 2019 on Saint-Laurent.
In Saint-Denis, the average value of purchases also increased over the period studied, rising from around $60 to $75 per customer. This last data seems to indicate that, even if customers arrive at the store on two wheels, their reduced loading capacity does not limit the value of their purchases.
“It somewhat contradicts the idea that buying local is mainly done by car,” explains the To have to Jean-François Rheault, CEO of Vélo Québec. “These data confirm what we also see in other cities like New York and Toronto, that expanding cycling infrastructure has a positive impact on local commerce. »
Montreal, London, New York
The bicycle, if adopted by merchants, can go even further and bridge the gap between buying local, shopping online and fighting the climate.
In terms of sustainable transport, the American company UPS upped the ante on Monday by inaugurating a “micromobility” center in the Hackney district of London. This center will oversee the delivery by cargo bike of at least one million parcels per year in the streets of the English capital where internal combustion engine vehicles are banned from circulation. This fleet of electric-assisted dump bikes is added to a thousand trucks that are also electrified. Amazon hopes that half of its deliveries in 2030 will be without GHG emissions, with its target being to be completely carbon neutral by 2040.
Amazon wants to quickly roll out a fleet of electric delivery bikes elsewhere in the world. New York City is next on its list. In addition to pollution issues, the difficulty of weaving delivery trucks through the narrow streets of the American metropolis reinforces the motivation to adopt more compact and more agile means of transport there—no need to double park and to arouse the ire of motorists while the delivery person waits at the recipient’s door to drop off his package.
You have to see it to believe it: the cycling infrastructure in New York has evolved enormously in the last two years. Bicycles – electric, in more than a third of cases – literally invaded the Big Apple during the pandemic. It’s quite a turnaround for a city where e-bikes were simply banned until 2018.
In New York, it is calculated that the delivery bike saves a little time and above all a lot of money. The delivery time is on average 6% shorter than by truck. Across the supply chain, the so-called “last mile”, the final part of the delivery that leads to the consignee and the part that can more easily be done on two wheels, accounts for 53% of the cost total deliveries for companies like DHL, FedEx or UPS.
Cargo bikes promise to substantially reduce this proportion. Cheaper, faster and cleaner, no wonder they are attracting everyone these days, in Montreal as elsewhere.