Celebrating the cargo bike revolution

A review of Motherload

Also published on Resilience

“Do you remember when your central purpose was to explore this world with your body? The sun and the wind, your legs, your breath, the water and dirt? This is how we understood the environment, and our place in it, and what it meant to be alive.”

Liz Canning remembers that everyday thrill of childhood. She remembers when that thrill disappeared under the obligations of adulthood and motherhood, when the sun and wind receded behind the sealed windows of a car, when exploring the world meant negotiating traffic jams in frustration. And she remembers rediscovering routine, daily joy with her children when she learned about cargo bikes and she escaped the cage of her car.

That’s the backstory of the deeply inspiring film Motherload. The feature-length documentary hit the festival circuit in 2019, and in 2020 it was released for on-demand rentals and purchase on Vimeo. (Education and library licensing available here and a DVD edition is here.)

Revolutions Per Minute

Motherload features Canning’s own story and the story of many other families, but the focus and the movie’s name developed several years into the project. The movie was produced through a crowd-sourcing model, with people around the world contributing stories, pictures, video clips and funds.

When I first became aware of the project in 2011 the working title was “Revolutions Per Minute: Cargo Bikes in the U.S.” A few years later the title had morphed to “Less Car More Go.” All along Canning was learning about the many types of cargo bikes, the people around the world who were building them and using them, and the first individuals and companies in the U.S. who were designing or importing cargo bikes.

This early research pays great dividends in the movie. Canning speaks with mountain bike design legend and historian Joe Breeze, and Xtracycle founder Ross Evans. She shows us how cargo bikes developed in Central America, West Africa, Australia and the Netherlands.

In the last 10 years the cargo bike movement has grown exponentially in North America. Cargo bikes, and cargo trailers pulled by bikes, became popular with tradespeople, mobile catering services, and courier services.

“It’s the moms”

But one type of cargo bike user became an increasingly important demographic: mothers with young families. Kaytea Petro of Yuba Bicycles – by then the largest seller of cargo bikes in the US – told Canning that “Seventy-five percent of our market are women.”

Thus it made perfect sense to name the movie Motherload, and to frame the issue through a series of personal stories – Canning’s own story, and the story of many other mothers who celebrate their new-found freedom to feel wind, sun and rain along with their children.

More than a hundred years ago the bicycle played a prominent role in women’s liberation. Today, Canning says, “We are still challenging notions of gender status, physical power, safety, even our definition of high quality of life.”

Unfortunately just as the suffragettes faced a lot of abuse from men, Motherload tells us about the “mom-shaming” and the vicious misogyny that women on cargo bikes often get from male drivers. Other hurdles include a lack of safe places to ride in many neighborhoods, and the high cost of still-rare cargo bikes (though the purchase price and especially the operating costs of cargo bikes are low compared to the cost of cars). Motherload packs in many stories and a lot of information, but there is still plenty of ground in this revolution for Canning or other documentarians to cover in future films.

Director Liz Canning and her twins

“We are teaching our children to become citizens of the earth,” Canning tells us. And she quotes Rebecca Solnit: “You do what you can. What you’ve done may do more than you can imagine, for generations to come.” The film closes with an image that will tug at the heart-strings of all parents, but particularly those in bicycling families: her twins, who first explored their world from the open-air box of a cargo bike, now pedal away on their own bikes, under their own power, down their own road.

picture at top of page: Emily Finch and her six children on their dual engine mini-bus

How we went from “makers” to “trash-makers” – and how to get back

Also published on Resilience


Why do we have so much stuff? Why is it so hard to find good stuff? And when our cheap stuff breaks, why is it so hard to fix it?

These questions are at the heart of our stories in 21st century industrialized nations, and these question are at the heart of Sandra Goldmark’s new book Fixation: How to Have Stuff Without Breaking the Planet.

As a theatre set designer Goldmark is attuned to the roles that things play in our personal stories. As a proprietor of a New York City “fix-it” shop, she understands why people want to keep and repair broken things, and why that is often unreasonably difficult. 

Fortunately for us she is also a darn good writer, whether she’s discussing the details of a damaged goose-neck lamp or giving an overview of a globe-spanning logistics system that takes materials on a one-way journey first to far-off factories, then to warehouses and stores, then to our homes, and finally, too soon, to our landfills. 

A copy of Fixation is one of the best gifts you could give or receive this season.

Linear Economy. Port trucks lining up for crane at Halifax loading dock.

Early in the book Goldmark asks why we are so attached to things, even when they have broken and it is more work to get them fixed than to buy new. This attachment, she says, is not pathological and indeed is at the very heart of being human. While many animals use simple tools, such as picking up a rock to crack nutshells, only humans make a point to save those tools. Living “in the moment” is great, but making preparations for the future is a key to our evolutionary success. Storing, maintaining, even loving our tools is thus a big part of human cultures.

The balance is seriously tilted, nevertheless, by an economic machine that depends on us buying more, all the time, and in particular buying new. Goldmark uses Ikea as a case study, describing their concerted effort to persuade customers that furniture is fashion, and we should buy new tables almost as often as we buy new clothes.

Then, too, there is carefully planned obsolescence, in products that we otherwise might keep for many years. Apple’s famously hard-to-replace batteries provide one example. Goldmark also describes an almost-durable desk lamp, which can be counted on to break because there is a plastic component where the lamp joins the gooseneck – that is, precisely where there is repeated motion and stress. Goldmark writes:

“Plastic is, very simply, a pain in the butt to fix. It’s hard to glue, and once compromised—cracked, scratched, nicked—it’s very hard to do anything useful with it at all. If you’ve got a plastic finish on something, you can, maybe, paint it or touch it up. But when plastic is used on component parts that take any stress, especially moving parts, it can mean that one small break makes the entire object useless.”

Placement. Loading “boxes” onto container ship, Halifax.

While plastic plays a big role in the factory-to-landfill pipeline, so too does cheap energy and international wage disparity:

“When  a  manufacturer  might  be  paid  three  dollars  per  hour  to  make  a  coffee machine in China or India, when raw materials and fuel for shipping are cheap, and a fixer in the States requires at least minimum wage, and hopefully more, it’s easy to see how making new cheap stuff became the dominant model.”

Thus in the United States in 2018, Goldmark writes, people spent about $4 trillion on new stuff but only $17.5 billion on used goods.

And while Americans like to celebrate their historical prowess as “makers”, not much is Made In America anymore. The makers, Goldmark writes, have been reduced to trash-makers. And unfortunately as the skills in making things atrophied, so too did the skills in repairing things.

Nudge. A tug guides a container ship to the wharf, Halifax harbour.

Getting beyond this unsustainable economy will require changes in attitudes, changes in education, changes in the manufacturing and retail chains, changes in wage allocations. Goldmark addresses all of these weighty subjects in beautifully accessible ways. With a nod to Michael Pollan, she rewrites his food mantra to apply to all the other things we bring home:

“Have  good  stuff  (not too much), mostly reclaimed. Care for it. Pass it on.”

Donating used goods helps, she writes, but “donating alone is not enough. If we’re not buying used ourselves, then we’re just outsourcing the responsibility of ‘closing the loop.’”

Caring for our things is both a simple and a complex undertaking. That means taking time to seek out quality items which will last and which can be repaired. It means promoting and honouring “embodied cognition” – simultaneous learning by head and hands, as practiced by people skilled in diagnosing and repairing. It means supporting companies that repair and resell their own products, and supporting local repair shops so they can pay a living wage.

As humans we will always want, need and have things, but our current way of life is unsustainable and we need to do much better. The good news, she says, is that

“We have the tools. We can build a better, circular model of care, of stewardship, of maintenance. A model where we value what we have.”

Photo at top of page: Freight yard at sunrise. Fairview Cove Container Terminal, Halifax, Nova Scotia. August 29, 2018. (click here for full-screen view)