Not to mention, every government tripping over themselves to hand out all kinds of multi billion dollar subsidies to any car manufacturer willing to set up shop in their jurisdiction. And a slew of implicit subsidies to car manufacturing, use, storage/parking, legal frameworks ("if you want to murder someone and get away with it, do it with a car"), etc.

Yeah, scale is the problem. The market is tiny compared to cars and even motorcycles. Brands like RAD and Lectric do compete on price and as a result they sell higher volumes than the nicer expensive R&Ms or Urban Arrows or whatever.

After over 15.000 Km of cycling with our bakfiets, I think I oiled the chain maybe 20 times. Replaced the tires once (and a few spokes due to user error/ring lock still locked+kick stand+two kids in the bike is not a good combo). Still on the first chain and cassette. I have never cleaned a chain.

Maybe your carbon bike with expensive options to save every last gram of weight requires so much maintenance, but any proper Dutch city bike or bakfiets made of steel will last very long with minimal maintenance

Complaining about oiling a chain is silly (especially with dry lubes), so you deserve a little push back there, but you're not wrong fundamentally.

Bikes in general do need some love. Especially: old bikes, cheap bikes, and heavily used ones: MTB and e-Bikes. They need a LOT of labour if you use them seriously, and bike shops just gouge the shit out of people. My local shop rate is $140 per hour ... for what is very often a sub-par to dangerous quality of work.

I do virtually all of my bike wrenching myself, because I grew up poor and didn't have a choice, and now I do it because I'm stubborn and like to know it's done properly. If I had to pay for all the work I've done, we're talking many 10's of thousands of dollars (I put a lot of MTB miles in). This just makes the whole affair unworkable to a lot of people.

Biking can be extremely economical, but good lord the average bike shop makes it hard. And the community just lets them get away with it, justifying insane markups and gouging by saying you have to support your LBS (this may be mostly astroturfing).

> Maintenance on bicycles is also insane. An "oil change" (clean and lube the chain) every 300 km or so.

In the Before Times (pre-COVID) I cycled 5km to work and 5km back, rain or shine, every workday from March to December in Toronto, Canada.

Every spring I'd spend $100 on a tune up, which usually included a new chain, and every ~second year I'd need a new rear cassette too and some new brake pads too. I've had the same tyres for 10+ years (though I get flats 1-2 times per year so needed new tubes). I lubed the chain once a week from a bottle that I purchased for $10 which lasts for 1-2 years.

I have no idea where you get your bike maintenance ideas from, but my experience was quite different after a decade of experience.

Lubing and cleaning a chain takes literally 30 seconds though and the materials cost like fifteen cents.

I find it a bit odd that people do so much service. Is there something about modern chain oil that makes it less effective than in the 80s? I'm pretty sure I forgot the chain most years, though whatever bike I had was always an example of survivor bias.

> If you were to actually pay a shop to do the maintenance, I suspect a bicycle would be more expensive per km than a car.

Not even close.

As other commenters have noted, lubing a chain is not especially challenging or expensive.

It takes 5 minutes. Nowhere near as involved as with a car oil change. And it’s simple enough that unless you’re basically inoperant as a being, you don’t need to pay a shop to do it.

With a fully enclosed chain guard, you hardly ever need to clean or oil the chain. Belt drives are basically maintenance-free.

Lots of people missing the point- not abusing and keeping an tool maintained is easy when the market is enthusiastic about said tool.

Which is essentially what most of the cargo bicycle market is right now.

Pushing it to a wider audience and expanding your users pushes the needle in one direction only: those less enthused about care and maintenance.

It also means less skilled riders, less common sense, more abuse, etc.

And if you want to open a business doing this as a service- you have 2 groups of clients: Cyclists and non-Cyclists who own bicycles.

I don't really want to imagine having to deal with either of those as my primary clients. For entirely different reasons. Unless I was charging absurd amounts.

300km is BS. No need to do so much maintenance every week unless the environment is really dirty.

Consumers are very sensitive to upfront cost.

There's a vicious cycle of automobile orientated development creating demand for cars. Cars are considered essential transportation tools. Bikes are considered nice to have recreational, fitness, or kids' toys. So people aren't willing to spend thousands on a bike unless it can replace a car.

> So there’s a significant amount of labour involved in effectively hand building (...)

I call bullshit on that take. Some brands sell electric cargo trikes for around $1k, while other brands sell their cargo bikes for >5k. You can buy a brand new Opel Rocks Electric for 3k more than a cargo bike. Are we expected to believe that an electric mini car is less labour intensive than a bike frame with a bucket and a COTS electric motor? Unbelievable.

> Price gouging is short term and localised. If you truly think you’ve identified a mispriced product, this is HN. You’re capable of more than loosely complaining about it.

I don't understand what point you tried to make. Whenever I see price gouging, my reaction is not to "disrupt markets" or put together elevator pitches. I move on with my life because I have better things to do with my life than planning to startup a company whenever I'm baffled by something.

In this case, if I see companies price gouging cargo bikes, I solve all my problems by not buying one. Easy. No elevator pitch required.

But that doesn't mean that people aren't being fleeced by these cargo bike companies.

I see price gouging in the price of cheese at my local grocer.

You won't see me buying cows and fencing to disrupt their market, I have better things to do.

In the US at least, the non-car infrastructure becomes less of a thing the farther out that you are.

pretty milk winter in toronto as well

everything is relative. biking in vienna in winter isn't similar at all to biking in winnipeg in the winter.

> You're not going to take your cargo bike on a weekend 200km trip or to visit family on the other side of the state/country unless you're bent on doing exactly that.

How many times are those types of trips done, as compared to 'just' running errands around town? What are the fixed costs you are incurring for those presumably occasional occurrences, versus optimizing for the more likely common cases?

It's like the folks who buy pickup trucks "for towing", but:

> According to Axios, 63% of Ford F-150 drivers barely use their trucks for towing. 29% admitted to towing occasionally, while just 7% regularly tow. When properly equipped, many F-150 models can pull around 13,000 pounds.

> However, 28% of drivers say they use the truck for hauling. Meanwhile, 41% take advantage of the F-150’s hauling capabilities once in a while, and 32% are indifferent. It’s a shame considering all F-150 models can haul about 2,000 pounds.

* https://www.motorbiscuit.com/63-of-ford-f-150-owners-almost-...

Perhaps buy for what you actually do, and rent for when you need 'extra' capabilities.

"electric mopeds pretending to be bikes" is a very apt description, and they make me pretty mad as well. I have to keep reminding myself that, egregious as they are, it's one less person in a car and one step closer to a critical mass of "bike culture", where biking is normalized. Biking will look very different once we reach that critical mass, but we'll all be better off overall.

Ideally you'd have at minimum a frame lock, and a beefy chain lock. When using the chain lock make sure the chain passes through the rear wheel and the read triangle of the frame, then back the other way outside the triangle of the frame. Lock the chain to something immovable. Ideally park somewhere there's other bikes as well.

Personally I've added a motion activated alarm on top of that, but that's mostly because I got tired of people fiddling with my bike and breaking shit.

Doing the above should get most thieves to try and steal the next bike over instead of yours. Still might be worth getting theft insurance though, depending on how bad it is where you live.

The mechanics may be paid the same, but the maintenance efforts are exponentially different, thus also exponentially reducing the costs. You need to remove zero parts to do just about all forms of maintenance on a bike, truing a wheel is probably the most effort part and thats still less time than a typical oil change.

> It’s 100% that they cost as much as a decent used car.

Apples and oranges. You can get cargo bikes second hand too.

Probably depends on the crime in the city and location. Here (Vienna, Austria) a lot of people just store them outside. We store ours on one of the parking spots we have (since we only have one car) together with some of our other stuff. They do take space, but I'm not sure if that is the main challenge with cargo bikes.

Personally I think it comes down to cost and availability. They cost around 5000 Euro if not more, and they take sometimes months to be delivered.

In Europe? In the building's designated areas for bicycles, or you just use the bike share systems like cargoroo.

They don't. You need to be rich, then you keep it chained near your front door or in backyard or wherever. You can't put them into the bike shed and people who have them also have a car, so parking spot is out too.

Some flats have boxes or full garages in the basement.

We rented a parking spot in our underground garage.

Speak for your rural or suburban self. I’m in North America, kids school is 420m from home.

Isn’t it obvious? 300 m is like five minutes of walking..?