What do you do when your restaurant is more than a stone fruit's throw from the Union Square Greenmarket and you want to haul a couple hundred pounds of produce back without resorting to a so-last-century fossil-fuel burning vehicle?
If you're Christophe Hille, an owner of Northern Spy restaurant in the East Village, you turn to your trusty Yuba Mundo extra-long cargo bike.
"We've had up to 200 pounds on there," says Hille of his retro-looking ride, outfitted with custom-built panniers made of heavy-duty nylon, one on each side and one across the back. A traditional breadbasket in the front rounds out the bike's impressive storage capacity.
It's not just for produce, either: The Mundo has hauled 200 pounds of planting soil, a mess of whole striped bass, a four- by three- by two-foot set of metal shelves from the Bowery, even three bushels of apples to Foley Square to distribute to Occupy Wall Streeters in 2011.
involved in the cargo bike movement," and went with the Yuba brand because it has the greatest cargo capacity. Spring is easy, says Hille, since greens are light. By high summer, when weightier tomatoes and melons fill the markets and his menu, Hille needs his Haley Tricycle, fitted with a storage box on its back that he says can easily carry 400 pounds.
Just about the time he outgrew his two-basket capacity, he happened by a cargo bike parked on the street. He left a note on the bike inquiring about it, and later learned it belonged to George Bliss, the bicycle evangelist who runs the West Village cycle shop HUB (Hudson Urban Bicycles). "George sort of rented the bike to me for the season for a ridiculously small amount, like $10," Hoffman recalls.
Hoffman's wife, Susan Rosenfeld, pedals supplies between the two Back Forty locations three days a week; her bike has a Burley trailer attachment, the little tent-like structure often used to haul toddlers, although lately she's been forgoing that to helm her husband's cargo bike. Pastries are her main cargo, but Back Forty does its own in-house butchery, and she's ferried everything from giant stock bones (usually attended by a pack of dogs trailing after her in Tompkins Square Park) to a whole pig. Once, she recalls, she had detached and locked up the Burley trailer when the Back Forty prep cook informed her he had 30 pounds of ground meat to get to Back Forty West pronto. Harried and in a hurry, she wrapped the package loosely in plastic to camouflage its contents, threw it on the back rack of her personal ride, a Cannondale, and set off across town again.
City Bakery's owner, Maury Rubin, brought bikes into his Chelsea-based business in 2005 when he moved the pastry kitchen to First Avenue and 13th Street and turned that property's vacant storefront into his first green, sustainability-focused bakery, Birdbath. As part of that eco effort, he threw in a 50 percent discount for customers who arrived via bicycle. Little did he know how avid and numerous bike enthusiasts were: Soon he was getting dozens of cyclist customers a day.
Rubin, who has long scrutinized the eco impacts of his ingredients, soon went for low-carbon transportation, too, by buying a bicycle rickshaw to transport pastries from First Avenue to City Bakery HQ on 18th Street and his additional Birdbath outposts. Over time, he eliminated one of his two vans and replaced it with two more cargo rickshaws and two standard bikes with baskets. During high harvest season at the Greenmarket, the bicycle rickshaws also pick up all City Bakery's produce purchases. Last year, Rubin's bikes traveled about 7,500 miles delivering among the four downtown Birdbath bakeries, all located within a 2.2-mile radius. This year he anticipates logging between 10,000 and 12,000 miles. Rubin also encourages biking among his staff; he's partnered with Bicycle Habitat to create an employee rebate/incentive and rewards program of deep discounts at the Nolita store (known for its bike advocacy). He even supports the organization Transportation Alternatives with in-kind donations.