Thurso Community Development Trust giving e-cargo bike a try as part of climate action commitment

Staff at Thurso Community Development Trust are looking at new ways to enhance their climate action credentials after taking delivery of an electric cargo bike.

They arranged through George Ewing, local development officer with Cycling UK, to have the bike on loan for a month. George leads the charity's Rural Connections activity in Caithness.

The trust's community development officer Zoe Mackenzie said she was delighted to get a chance to try it out.

"At Thurso Community Development Trust we try to ingrain climate action into everything that we do and active travel is a big part of that," Zoe explained. "We approached George to borrow the cargo bike to see which ways we can include it in our projects before we commit to buying one for ourselves.

"We have lots of ideas for how we’ll use it."

One example will be making deliveries within Thurso from Socially Growing, the trust's zero-waste shop in the town centre.

"We will be making it possible to order anything from the shop online," Zoe said. "If someone needs some flour, for example, they can tell us how much they want online and we’ll weigh it out into one of the free containers we have available and cycle it across to them on the cargo bike, along with any other bits and pieces they need.

"We also plan to use it for our regular community meals which are currently happening once a month. At the end of April we’ll be trialling it by choosing an area in Thurso to deliver all meals in their insulated bag directly to each person’s door.

"We think it’ll be a great way to start to reduce the emissions used when driving to deliver meals, and also a bit of a novelty getting your meals that way."

The bike has a battery which can be removed and charged up again.

"There are different levels of assist on it – from 'tour', which gives a gentle bit of help, right up to 'turbo' which is what we’ll need to get up the hill in Springpark," Zoe said. "The bike handily tells you how many miles you can do on each setting before it’ll need charged.

"We have the cargo bike on loan for about a month from Cycling UK. If people would like to volunteer with us specifically to do a delivery on the cargo bike, they should email us at info@thursocdt.co.uk – if they’d like to borrow an e-bike for themselves they can contact George."

Zoe added: “I was delighted to get to use the cargo bike on our first run delivering some shopping to someone isolating with Covid. It feels really light to steer once you’re on it, and the assist helped with a few steeper roads along the way. It was a really good feeling knowing that the bike saved a short journey that otherwise would have needed to have been done by car.”

George said: “Cycling UK’s Rural Connections project is delighted that Thurso Community Development Trust has taken this opportunity to use one of our e-cargo bikes. It is cleaner and greener and it can make you leaner than your traditional means of delivery.

"It's great for reducing congestion and reducing delivery costs, costing roughly 1.5 pence of electric per mile. Not only this but it’s good for your health to get out in the fresh air too.

"Rural Connections have several e-cargo bikes available for free loan to any organisation, individual or business in Caithness. Anyone interested can get in touch via our Facebook page Cycling UK Highland – free training can also be supplied.”

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