When Shel [Horowitz] was a high school student in New York City, he learned that bicycling the five hilly miles to his school on his 3-speed was generally faster than taking the bus the long way around, and almost always much more enjoyable. And local grocers often used delivery bikes: industrial, heavy-duty one-speed bikes with a big storage compartment on the front.

Modernizing that concept, we discover that bikes with trailers can haul enormous loads. In Northampton, Massachusetts, for example, Pedal People, a bicycle-powered trash hauling and produce delivery service, has been operating many years. Its small fleet of trailer-equipped bikes prices its services fairly close to truck-powered trash haulers, and has picked up contracts from many local stores and offices.

But let’s not stop there. The bicycle world has been full of innovation lately. Want examples? How about the Copenhagen Wheel, a nonmotorized device that stores a bicyclist’s kinetic energy and releases it when that rider needs extra power (like going uphill)? Or the ELF, a pedal vehicle with solar assist, an enclosed cab, disc brakes, enough lockable storage for 12 bags of groceries, infinitely variable gearshifting, and enough other cool features that Jerry Seinfeld bought one. With a 14-mile range on just battery power (much farther if you’re pedaling some of the time), this can actually replace a commuter car. It comes in one-, two-, and three-passenger configurations.

A similar venture, the Virtue Pedalist, offers similar features in a smaller footprint at a comparable price. Not only are these practical commuting vehicles for people who work up to 20 miles from home, they’re also being marketed to people with mobility disabilities, some of whom can now ride a bike again for the first time in years.

Of course, switching to bikes creates immediate health and fitness benefits for the riders. But here’s something interesting: a paper published in the scientific journal Environmental Health Perspectives found that the combination of cleaner air and lower medical bills provided a huge economic boost as well: switching half the trips of five miles and under from car to bike would create a $7.1 billion boost to the economy in the 11 cities studied.Wow!

From Guerrilla Marketing to Heal the World, by Jay Conrad Levinson, and Shel Horowitz