Reimagining commercial mobility at the human scale: stabilizing cargo bike use in everyday work practices

Kurzfassung

Commercial cycling is often framed as a technical or economic substitution problem. We argue instead that the long-term integration of cargo bikes in firms is a practice-based, multi-faceted change process shaped by organizational routines, employee experiences, vehicle characteristics, and spatial conditions. Bringing cycling into commercial operations extends the social domain of the bicycle beyond commuting and leisure into everyday work and increases its visibility in public space. This paper asks: How do cargo bikes become durably embedded in commercial mobility practices, and which factors stabilize or destabilize this process over time? Empirically, we draw on a 12-month accompanied real-world trial with more than 40 organizations in Germany. Participating firms incorporated cargo bikes of different designs into daily operations. Our analysis uses qualitative evidence as its core, supplemented by questionnaires, GPS tracking, and cost data. We identify 20 factors grouped into five dimensions: organizational behavior, vehicle-related factors, operational implementation, infrastructure and usage patterns, and external conditions. We assess how strongly and in which direction each factor relates to sustained adoption at the end of the trial, and how these patterns vary across organizational profiles, business sectors, and spatial contexts. Findings show that durable integration is not simply a function of mileage. Cargo-bike use stabilizes when it becomes a reliable, workable, and collectively supported way of carrying out freight or service trips. Especially important are leadership commitment, employee acceptance, supportive internal roles, clearly defined use cases, and vehicle-task fit. In contrast, weak ownership, ad hoc use, and inadequate service, among other factors, destabilize longer-term use. By shifting attention from adoption as a decision to stabilization as a lived organizational practice, the paper extends debates on behavioral change and the human scale of cycling to commercial mobility.