Copenhagen designer and transportation consultant Mikael Colville-Andersen has perhaps done more than anyone else in recent years to put the cool back into bicycling. Colville-Andersen, CEO of the Copenhazenize Design Co., founded the Cycle Chic blog, a brand that has spread to cities worldwide. He spends a good deal of his time evangelizing about the benefits of bicycling to cities, and taking photographs of cyclists in the streets.
Colville-Andersen is a particular fan of cargo bikes — bicycles built to carry everything from parcels to people. (He himself pedals a Danish-designed Bullitt cargo bike that Grist Senior Editor Greg Hanscom recently took for a spin.) And in rifling through his photo archives not long ago, he realized that of the 15,000 or so photos he’d taken while documenting bicycle culture around the world, easily 3,000 were of cargo bikes. The result: A new self-published book called Cargo Bike Nation that features “photo after photo of cargo bikes, as well as bicycles with cargo.”
“At the end of the day I just wanted to produce the ultimate cargo bike photo book,” Colville-Andersen writes in the introduction. “Nothing sells cargo bikes like a long line of photos showing Citizen Cyclists and others using a cargo bike in their daily lives. As a vital tool for urban living.”
Here’s a sampling of the photos in the book. You can take a sneak peek on Colville-Andersen’s blog.