Pedal Me is revolutionising urban logistics with our fleet of e-assist cargo bikes. We’re not just a courier service, we’re a smarter, cleaner, and more efficient alternative to vans and trucks in London.
https://www.pedalme.co.uk/
Nirvana interviews Ben
hello I’m Nirvana from the Ministry of Eco Education and you’re watching our London Climate Action Week series today’s theme is transport [Music] and although I’m at a London Underground station right now I’m actually not looking at trains instead I’m meeting an organization that is using bikes to completely rethink how both people and goods travel around London thank you so much for speaking with me no worries um what is your name and what is your job
sure my name is Ben Nolles and I’m the chief executive of uh PedalMe so we’re a cargo bike delivery company that I sat with some friends um the original concept started in 2017 it was two of us now there are 85 people working to do sustainable deliveries uh and there’s a couple of other things that make our company a bit unique and better at what we do than the competition
okay so well first of all let’s hear about what makes your work sustainable compared with other bike delivery companies
sure well uh the first thing is that we use bikes as a much more complete solution so what we specifically set out to do is to look at van trips and say how can we replace that van trip usually bike logistics is focused on here’s a bike what logistics can bikes do and we’ve started the other way round and that turns out is quite transformational for the customer what that means is that people can just say “Oh I’m just going to book this service which is a direct replacement for a van because we can carry similar amounts to a van
because of the way first of all we have our own design of bikes uh we spent a lot of time uh working with a manufacturer in the Netherlands to make these unique bikes and then we built our own training systems to allow our staff to maximize the use of those bikes so therefore you can carry 150 kilos which is a lot
wow
so we can also carry people so we can carry two grown-ups or depending on how big they are four or five children on the front of our bikes and we do actually get used for school runs
amazing well so we’ve got one of your bikes uh here behind us um how is this delivery bike different from the other bikes that you sometimes see you know carrying food deliveries or little supermarket shops um the other bikes you see on the streets of London yeah it’s it’s interesting actually cuz the underlying bike is actually a very similar design to what lots of other Korea companies use but we can carry twice as much
wow
at least twice as much as they can and that means we’re useful for a lot more different types of job but also in logistics it’s valuable because it means we can carry consignments for different customers that are going in the same direction because we have employees that means that we have to pay the tax associated with employment whereas our competitors use something called the gig economy which is question marks over how legal the systems they are using are and also some they quite often get infiltrated with um modern slavery uh which is why we’ve branded our bikes slavery free logistics to try and draw attention to the issue
okay so you’re actually focusing on sustainability not only for the planet in terms of um logistics without carbon emissions but also sustainable for the people living in London and making sure people can actually earn a proper wage and live a good life with a job working for
PedalM 100% uh everyone gets paid something called the London living wage so everyone gets paid enough to get by in London um
which is more expensive than other cities which is more expensive than other cities and this isn’t the first project that I’ve worked on
in transport um there’s something called school streets which might well have affected schools
a whole lot of children who might be watching this
so that was an idea that I stole from a Dutch transport planner
essentially
i got some funding from
I borrowed the idea i um I got some funding from TfL
and then uh it was it was really not a lot of funding we managed to get the first projects in in London and then we published the how-to guide
how to do school streets amazing
and now in the UK there’s thousand school streets there’s 300 school streets in Paris they’re in Barcelona and they’re in even in the US so we’ve mentioned a bit about um like you mentioned school streets yeah so we’ve got two forms of transport here what do you think is the role of transport in making London a more sustainable city i have spent the last 15 years working on transport projects and I cannot tell you how powerful transport is in shaping everyone’s lives not just in terms of sustainability and yes uh transport is our biggest CO2 emit emitting sector in the UK um so it’s the area where we’ve got the most opportunity to make changes but it also makes a huge difference to everyone’s lived experience
absolutely and uh if we go back to that school streets example um where you have a school street then you have children playing in the street you have parents talking it’s an incredibly powerful thing and it gives people a little snapshot of how the world could be if we traveled less with cars how much better the world could be where you can talk to your neighbor you can talk to your friends um you can interact in a way that allows you to help each other cuz humans are very much we’re coded to to support each other to help each other
to connect
to connect but if the road is really busy it makes it a noisy and unpleasant space and it means you can’t interact and trains motorbikes and cars are on the slightly noisier more dangerous side um whereas trains buses bikes um allow for a bit more human connection
100% and trains are important in that because trains are outrageously efficient uh you know you can move 14,000 people an hour through a single railway track and if you try and move the same in the same space we try and move people with cars and you get about a thousand people an hour so it’s 14 times as efficient with bikes it’s about 7 or 8,000 people an hour through the same space um
so fewer people but fewer emissions
there’s also this very magical thing about cycling
mhm
in that um it’s exercise while you travel and turns out that exercising while you travel is like the most powerful way to exercise to positively impact your health
okay
so
I’ve got a crazy stat for you
yes so uh the University of Glasgow did this big research experiment where they looked at lots and lots of people’s lives and looked at what things they could see that people were doing that were changing how likely they were to to live a long and healthy life
and they found that cycling reduced your chances of dying in any given year by 40% it’s not just about um how long you can live although that you know that’s a benefit too but it’s also about the quality of life that you get where you get that social interaction that we talked about where um cuz you’re exercising that means you get more energy it’s kind of not as simple as you do some exercise and then you’re tired although that’s the immediate effect
overall if you do more exercise you can do more stuff uh your energy levels are raised and get more of that human interaction okay sometimes you’re out in the rain and that can be a bit bit of a more uh challenging experience but also those kind of slightly challenging experiences are very good for you as a human
absolutely cuz in general in everyone’s life there is challenge there are difficult bits and having just a little bit of challenge in your everyday life and overcoming those challenges is really really important in then allowing you to overcome those other challenges more easily and uh and being happier about it
you practice on the small challenges so that then you’re ready for the big challenge
100% 100%
so that’s a great piece of of advice already i was going to ask for if you have a tip for someone watching who either wants to try and um change the way they travel to make it more sustainable or maybe especially for children who may not have a choice about how they get around what is something they can do to bring more sustainable transport into their everyday life sure it’s tricky but I would say don’t underestimate your own power in being able to change how people think and um you know as a young person there are a lot of people that are very interested in your life so that’s you know aunts uncles uh guardians your teachers these people all are interested in your well-being and interest in what you have to say although it might not always feel like it um and if you want to make a change and it’s something you really want to push for then I think that you will be able to to do that if you want to be able to use a bike to get around um you can get bikes secondhand quite cheaply it might be I know some schools they organize sort of bring and buy sales for for secondhand bikes maybe that’s an opportunity or maybe you know uh ask around maybe there’s someone who’s getting rid of a bike they don’t want anymore um I’d say it’s definitely worth practicing using a bike in a in a environment away from the road and it’s also really worth you can generally get free cycle training through your school uh and that’s incredibly powerful in not just teaching you how to get around using a bike but it’s actually it’s just a very empowering thing because you get taken out on the road and shown how to control the traffic around you how to move in traffic how to take your kind of rightful space in traffic um so I definitely recommend getting that training if you can make sure your bike’s well looked after um uh and go cycling with your friends in environments away from the road improve your skills have fun uh and then make small trips using your bikes go to the shops uh and build up from there i mean I think it’s not just young people but humans in general underestimate their ability to change the society that they exist in you know the society that we exist in today was created by people making that change happen whether that’s the suffragettes uh you know making really big sacrifices locking themselves to things protesting um writing letters all of these things can be quite powerful because most people don’t use that power because most people sit as kind of um sort of being relatively passive and not using their power the people that do use that power in speaking out and trying to make change get a really big say in creating our society and can have a really big impact and our society is entirely built on those people doing those things you know our society doesn’t didn’t just come out of nowhere it was created by the choices of the people within the society and people doing things to make their society better
people like you people like you
thank you so much this has been really interesting and I’m really looking forward to having a look around
amazing yeah let’s go take a look at the site [Music] [Music] this is our new big fridge uh it’s very exciting for me so what we’re doing here is we have deliveries coming in overnight for restaurants so they arrive in the middle of the night get delivered to us things like fresh fish straight out of the sea comes out of the sea at 9 or 10:00 at night gets loaded onto uh a big lorry and then that’s refrigerated gets driven to London the lorry gets unloaded into here then we in the morning we come in and we collect from the fridge we can actually bring bikes in and out of this big fridge uh cuz the door is wide enough and there’s a door at the other end so people come through that door load up with fish fruit and veg whatever it is that they’re collecting for the restaurants then they go out to the restaurants we deliver all sorts of of things out across London so we deliver uh stationery for offices and one of our advantages is we can just carry an awful lot more than anyone else can using bikes and that’s because of the special design of bikes we have but also the way we train our staff so you might think well what can you deliver on a bike well maybe you can deliver a letter or maybe um like a a little package like that is maybe what you might think you can deliver on a bike but turns out we can deliver Procco big boxes of paper these bikes are a bit like the TARDIS yes they just keep on loading up and loading up and loading up [Music] one other fun little fun fact we used to use bunggees to secure loads uh but we found that bungees were actually quite dangerous compared to the rest of our operation so you’d lean over and then you’d hook the bungee sometimes it wouldn’t grab properly and because you’re in this position where it can ping you in the face so uh we found that that was actually our biggest cause of injuries people tend to think of riding a bike as being a bit unsafe but actually if you’re trained and you know what you’re doing then actually the cycling bit is very safe so with the hooks being a problem we got rid of the hooks and we found that actually old inner tubes from bikes we collect them from bike shops they’re free and the bike shops are very pleased to see them gone and they are actually the best thing for securing loads onto the bikes so you’re also recycling
also recycling they’re very stretchy very strong um and they’re very easy to tie knots with so that means the load is just very secure very quickly we did some work with the University of Westminster looking at our data and doing some comparisons with van deliveries and they found that we could do 60% more deliveries in the same time that a van could and that’s because you don’t spend time parking in the same way you uh uh loading maybe takes just a little bit longer depending on what the load is but you can load up right next to wherever you’re collecting from rather than having to have a trailer a trolley and do lots of trips back and forth um we can bring the bike into the building and load it up there as we do with the fridge load up inside the fridge so that makes it really efficient so it’s not just that it’s sustainable but it’s actually just more efficient too woo
all right all aboard all aboard wa all right but yes I’m very happy woo got money woohoo got [Music] money [Music]