Brandon Quizeno has a driver’s license, so in theory he could be steering an Amazon van around New York City delivering parcels.
Instead, he does his deliveries with an Amazon cargo bike out of a hub on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
“With vans, it can be hell finding parking, especially in the narrow streets,” Mr. Quizeno, 21, from the Hamilton Heights section of Manhattan, said on a recent delivery run. “These bikes, they’re better.”
Amazon’s dark blue, battery-powered, pedal-assist cargo bikes are now common in parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn. They have four wheels and an enclosed container on the back that can hold over 100 parcels. It takes the bikes two trips to make roughly the same number of deliveries as a van — and they cost significantly less to operate.
Amazon declined to say what share of home deliveries in New York are made by the bikes, but Emily Barber, the company’s director of global fleet and products, said they were proving to be more efficient than vans on certain routes.
“We’re optimistic that this is a delivery mode that’s here to stay,” she said.
After a recent expansion, Amazon has over 300 cargo bikes doing same-day deliveries in Manhattan. This month, the company announced a pilot program for the bikes in Washington D.C., and a spokesman said it was planning pilots in other American cities for this year.
E-commerce has increased the number of trucks and vans on New York’s streets. In 2024, 2.5 million packages were delivered a day in New York City, up from 1.8 million five years earlier, according to a report from the city’s comptroller. The report also found that the number of traffic crashes and injuries increased in areas near the logistics hubs from which home deliveries are made.
Safety is one of the reasons that Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration supports the use of cargo bikes.
The bikes “play a key role in achieving a safer and more sustainable transportation future by helping us reduce the number of large, high-polluting trucks on our streets,” Vincent Barone, a press secretary for city’s Transportation Department, said in an emailed statement.
Goods-carrying bikes are common in many European cities that have long had cycling cultures and narrower streets than most American cities. New York has allowed battery-powered cargo bikes to operate since 2024, stipulating that they cannot travel faster than 15 miles per hour or be parked on a sidewalk.
Cargo bikes can travel in most bike lanes, which means they don’t contribute as much to congestion, and they can sail past stationary traffic.
“I love how fast-paced this job can be,” said Mr. Quizeno, who works between 25 and 30 hours a week and earns around $2,000 a month. He is employed by Accelerated Flywheel Logistics, a company that is legally separate from Amazon but has close operational ties with the company, and uses Amazon branding on its vehicles and uniforms. Many of Amazon’s deliveries in New York and elsewhere are done by these types of companies, called delivery service partners.
Accelerated Flywheel started its operations in October, and now has 155 employees doing deliveries with 40 cargo bikes, said Charles DiMaria, its president. The vehicles have two batteries, which are stored in a fireproofed cabinet at the company’s hub on the Lower East Side. The first delivery shift starts at 3:15 a.m., and the operations close at 11 p.m.
Mr. Di Maria said many of the employees had previously done gig delivery work for companies like DoorDash. His company’s regular schedule appeals to many of them, he said.
On a recent morning in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, a fleet of 22 Amazon cargo bikes lined up and were loaded with packages before they trickled out of an Amazon fulfillment center to make deliveries across the borough.
Cargo bikes are responsible for around half of the 10,000 to 15,000 packages that are delivered from the site each day, said Juan Martinez, the president of COPR Industries, an Amazon delivery partner operating out of the Red Hook facility. The rest go on vans, most of which are electric vehicles, he said.
In addition to the cargo bikes, Amazon makes significant use of pushcarts for home deliveries. In many cases, trucks transport the loaded carts to one spot, which acts as a temporary hub. Workers then push the carts to apartment buildings.
Over 64 million Amazon packages were delivered to New Yorkers last year using the bikes and pushcarts, Ms. Barber said, adding that these deliveries helped Amazon reduce congestion. The company declined to give the breakdown between pushcarts and bikes.
Last year, New York City started charging a toll on vehicles that enter Manhattan below 60th Street. Asked whether the cargo bikes helped Amazon avoid the toll, a company spokesman said its use of the bikes predated it.
Despite the greater use of the cargo bikes and electric vans, Amazon’s carbon emissions have been rising, primarily from its logistics network, according to its most recent sustainability report.
Seeking to show that it is making some progress, Amazon often cites another metric: emissions per package delivered. The use of electric delivery vehicles, cargo bikes included, has helped bring that number down, Ms. Barber said.
In 2021, UPS said it was looking into using cargo bikes in New York; a UPS spokesman declined to comment on the status of that effort.
DutchX, a delivery company operating in New York, sorts packages for other companies at a facility in Red Hook, then puts them on a boat that makes a voyage of under 20 minutes to Pier 79 in Manhattan. At the pier, the packages are loaded onto cargo bikes for delivery in the borough.
Currently, DutchX mostly uses e-bikes that pull a low-lying trailer, a vehicle that Amazon also uses, for grocery deliveries.
But Marcus Hoed, a co-founder of DutchX, said the company was going to start adding more of the cargo bikes that have containers on the back. A recent order from Honda cost about $25,000 per bike, he said.
There are areas of New York where the bikes make far more sense than bigger vehicles, Mr. Hoed said. “A van in the financial district is the biggest disaster,” he said, contending that the vehicles block the narrower streets there and get held up in traffic. “With a bike, you create much more efficiency.”
Peter Eavis reports on the business of moving stuff around the world.
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