Every so often a message lands in my inbox that reminds me why we do this. Not the coffee, not the brunch, not even the bikes on the showroom floor, but what happens when one of those bikes rolls out the door and gets used. Really used. Out in the city, doing something that matters.
This past couple of weeks we got two of those messages, and I wanted to share them with you.
Carla Goes to Home County
If you’ve been by the café, you may have seen our Tern HSD cargo bike and Carla trailer parked out front, looking ready for work. Over the Home County Music and Art Festival weekend, it got exactly that.
We lent the setup to the festival, and Bernie Lawrence, their Volunteer Coordinator, sent me a note afterward that I haven’t stopped thinking about:
The amount of compostable material diverted from landfill was significantly greater than last year. One of the pix shows the army of green bins we filled.
An army of green bins. That’s a cargo bike hauling compost across Victoria Park all weekend instead of a truck idling its way through the same job. That’s the whole idea, right there. The bike wasn’t a novelty, it was the tool that got the work done.
Bernie also mentioned the setup drew a fair bit of attention out on the route, “despite the presence of the old guy in the front,” as he put it. (His words, Bernie, not mine.)
The bike’s washed up and back home at the café now, ready for whatever’s next.
Reaching Where the Vans Can’t: 519 Pursuit
The second story came to us the way a lot of good things do these days, as an Instagram post that stopped me in my tracks.
For the past two years, we’ve had a quiet partnership with 519 Pursuit, whose Outreach Team works with folks in London experiencing homelessness, extreme poverty, and food insecurity. Their vans do a lot of that work. But a van can only go where a road goes, and some of the people who most need connecting with are down a trail, along a pathway, tucked into a park, in exactly the places a vehicle can’t reach.
So every week, one of our bikes goes out with their team instead.
As they put it in their post:
Having access to one of The London Bicycle Café’s bikes each week has given our team another way to connect with friends experiencing homelessness, extreme poverty, and food insecurity, bringing meals, snacks, water, basic needs, and, most importantly, friendship and support directly to them.
Meals, water, basic needs, and friendship, carried the last stretch by bike, to people a van would have had to drive past. They called it “a simple idea with a meaningful impact,” and I don’t think I can say it better than that. Geography stops being a barrier to care. A bike closes the gap.
That’s the kind of thing you don’t always see when you sell someone a bicycle. This one just happens to spend its weeks doing some of the most important work in the city.
This Is What #BikesForBusiness Is For
Here’s the part I want to make sure you take away from both of these stories. Neither one happened by accident. They happened because we run a program called #BikesForBusiness, and both Home County and 519 Pursuit are exactly the kind of partners it was built for.
The idea is simple. We make our bikes and trailers available for long-term trials to qualifying organizations, so you can find out what a cargo bike actually does for your operation before committing to one. That might be office-to-office trips, visiting clients in the urban core, or moving product and materials (up to 450 lbs on the bike, or 900 lbs with the trailer). Or, as these two showed us, it might be something we never would have thought of ourselves, like diverting festival compost or reaching people a van can’t.
If your organization has ever wondered whether a bike could do a job you’re currently doing with a vehicle, this is the low-risk way to find out. Take one out. Put it to work. See what happens.
You can learn more at londonbicyclecafe.com/bikesforbusiness, or just email us at info@londonbicyclecafe.com and we’ll talk it through.
Why This Matters to Us
For us, selling a bike was never meant to be the end of the story. The reason we built a café around the bikes, the reason there’s coffee and a patio and people lingering, is that we wanted the bikes to be part of the city, not just products on a wall.
When the cargo bike hauls compost for a festival, or when a 519 Pursuit outreach worker rides a meal down a trail to someone who needs it, that’s the point landing. Bikes aren’t just how you get somewhere. Sometimes they’re how the work gets done, how the waste gets diverted, how a weekend runs a little lighter on the planet, and sometimes they’re how care reaches a person a road couldn’t.
So thank you, to Bernie and the Home County crew, to the team at 519 Pursuit, and to everyone who takes a bike out our door and puts it to good use. Send us your photos. We love seeing where they end up.