Shipping Green: Pedaling to Cut Emissions
Friday, 06 August 2010 |  Linda Baker and April Streeter  |  0 comment

Image by Shane Gorski

Franklin Jones didn’t set out to start a bike-based business. When he formed B-Line Sustainable Urban Delivery, which moves fruit, vegetables, coffee, water and even bicycle parts around Portland’s urban core on two pedal-assist electric cargo bikes, he was much more interested in the sustainable aspect of his company.

“I was more focused on the greening of the distribution network than the bike business niche in starting this up,” Jones said. “Yes, bikes are an important tool. But I was looking at the gap and trying to find the missing link in sustainable transportation.”

A lot of people in Portland are looking for that missing link. Transport makes up a quarter to a third of the city’s carbon emissions, for example, and Portland has committed to ambitious reductions of 10 percent of 1990 benchmarks by the end of this year, and 40 percent below 1990 numbers by 2030. Those reduction goals intertwine and can conflict with the need to consistently improve access to transportation, keep it flowing, and do it cost-effectively.

Jones eventually found that pedal-assist electric bikes actually were a superior tool for a certain type of transport segment – small- to medium-sized companies moving goods around to multiple locations in the inner city. Jones’ B-Line service also manages to be cost effective for customers such as Organically Grown Co., the largest distributor of organic produce in the Northwest, because one driver in a big truck can be slowed balancing a few huge and critical deliveries with a lot of little ones.

Offloading the multiple small stops to B-Line was a big time saver and thus a money saver. In Organically Grown’s case, the arrangement also gives the company new access to smaller customers that previously couldn’t meet minimum requirements for a truck-delivered load, but can with a cargo bike delivery.

In 18 months of operation, B-Line has delivered nearly 200,000 pounds of fruits and veggies for Organically Grown, and all together replaced 3,700 truck or van deliveries with 7,000 miles of pedal-powered deliveries – that equals a 21,000-pound reduction in CO2 emissions.

Clearly, B-Line’s two cargo cycle trucks working six hours a day on deliveries represent just one tiny stream in a huge river of goods moving in and out of Portland. The challenge is scaling this type of delivery of inner-city freight to a level that actually can make an appreciable difference for sustainable transport goals.

“I could see maybe getting to 10, 15 cycle trucks in the downtown core,” Jones said. “But in terms of a larger transport network and particularly freight moving goods all throughout a city, it can’t just be bikes, there’s got to be integration. That requires a paradigm shift.”

Franklin Jones, meets Peter Hurley, Portland Bureau of Transportation. Hurley has been working with a group of 14 regional experts in sustainable transport to come up with a tool to take the vast complexity of a city’s transport infrastructure, and help it do things more sustainably, corridor by corridor.

Hurley’s group has come up with a points-based software rating tool called STARS. At its most basic, Hurley said, it is LEED, the U.S. Green Building Council’s certification system, transferred to transport.

In other words, STARS is a national set of standards that transport planners and designers can use to get credits for doing things in a more sustainable manner.

“The transport industry has really lagged in adopting measures to improve economy and environment indicators,” Hurley said. “The idea with STARS is to look holistically in order to improve access, reduces GHGs and be cost effective — in the same way that LEED used the existing framework to look at what new construction should be, STARS does that for urban STARS, which stands for Sustainable Transportation and Access Rating System, is still in its beta stages, due to be ready this December. The Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission in California is the software tool’s first beta tester as it plans for expansion of a piece of Highway 1.

While STARS will give Santa Cruz credits for deciding, for example, to reduce “low value” car trips by having car pool and van pool lanes, or promote telecommuting, there is also a category that gives credit for innovation.

Hurley said a scheme such as Jones’ B-line, championed by a city trying to decrease gas-powered truck trips on a major thoroughfare rather than add lanes, is an example of a credit-worthy project.

“As long as a project can show it achieves the access, climate/energy, cost efficiency goals, we want to champion all the innovations we haven’t thought of,” Hurley said.

Hurley played down the exact measure of sustainability STARS can deliver, but he said he is unabashed about its potential. “It’s by far the most innovative tool for sustainable transport we have in North America.”

While the contentious and expensive Columbia River Crossing bridge may seem in dire need of such a piece of software, Hurley cautioned that STARS likely won’t be used on it.

“With the stage we’re at, and the stage the project is at, and the – well, the difficult process with that project so far – we’re not even attempting to try to apply it,” he said.

B-Line’s Jones at this point is growing his company slowly while continuing to look at the same big picture goals as Hurley. “We’re a market disruptor, and sometimes that means it is not a slam dunk, we’ve got convincing to do,” Jones said. “And I don’t quite see the sea change that I want. But I do feel the little start of a shift. People tell us that they like what we are doing … they want it to work.”

Pedal-Assist Bike Delivery
B-line’s bikes are actually called “high capacity” tricycles and are imported from the UK’s Cycles Maximus. Two back wheels support the cargo hold, which can hold up to 600 pounds of goods. The pedal-assist is just that – a small electric motor assists the rider with pedaling, but the bike or trike doesn’t move without that pedal power.

Source: Enzyme PDX

Picture Source: Flickr