Deliveries work as follows: A DHL van delivers "City Hubs" which are customized trailers that can carry up to four 125-kilo containers into the city center. The containers are loaded on to Cubicyles for last-mile, inner-city delivery. The City Hub can then be reloaded with outbound shipments.

Each human-powered City Hub can replace up to two standard fossil-fuel-based delivery vehicles, with an equivalent CO2 savings of more than 16 tonnes per year. DHL currently runs two pilot programs – one in Frankfurt and another in Utrecht.

“DHL Express has already replaced up to 60 percent of inner-city vehicle routes in some European countries with cargo bicycles, and we expect that the City Hub and Cubicycle will both help us to accelerate this approach in other markets over the next three to five years,” said John Pearson, CEO of DHL Express Europe. He noted that, in addition to not spewing pollution, bicycles can bypass traffic congestion and make up to two times more stops per hour than a delivery vehicle.

The pedaled vehicles still use standardized containers, providing the same ease of transfer between different modes of transportation within the DHL Express network, while increasing speed and reliability to DHL’s last-mile delivery operations for documents and small packages.

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