Hello Cargobikers,

Only a couple of weeks since the last one, which for me counts as a streak. Three things changed on OpenCargo, and all three are live.

We changed the line.

It used to say the cargo bike aftermarket, unified. It now says the cargo bike market, unified.

One word, but it had started to lie. When this thing was only boxes, bags and racks, aftermarket was the honest word for it. Then came the shops, the forum, the community designs – and aftermarket only described a corner of the site. Same name, same logo, same stubborn independence. Just the line.

We're on Instagram.

I finally caved: @opencargo.bike.

One maker gets a proper look every week – the logo, the products, the details you only catch up close. In between, the bikes themselves and the things you lot have designed and built. If you make stuff for cargo bikes, that's where you'll get shown. You don't have to pitch me, that's rather the point.

2,848 shops, one map.

This is the big one. You can't buy a cargo bike from a photo. You need to ride one, take a corner with it, and find out whether it fits through your gate.

Cargo bikes are held up by thousands of local bike shops, and there was nowhere to find them all in one place. There is now.

Type a postcode, an address or a town, pick how far you're willing to travel – 10 up to 100 km – and filter by the brand you actually want to ride. The orange dots stock more than one brand: those are the shops worth the extra ride, because you can compare a long john against a box bike in one afternoon.

Six cities have their own page, in the local language: Berlin, Hamburg, København, Amsterdam, Antwerpen and London.

Find a shop near you → opencargo.bike/shops

And if a shop near you is missing, wrong, or shut down two years ago – hit reply. It comes straight to me and it's the fastest way that map gets better.

Two more things, both new, both quiet.

There's a forum. It lives at opencargo.bike/forum, and you can also ask a question straight from any product or platform page.

Let me be honest with you though: it is completely empty. Zero threads, zero replies. I could have seeded it with questions I wrote myself, but that seemed like a poor way to start something. So if you've ever wanted to know which box actually fits a 2019 Bullitt, whether anyone has ridden a particular bike through a proper winter, or what on earth to do about your kid outgrowing the bench – go and ask it. Whoever posts first gets the honour, and I'll answer everything that lands.

And search now speaks your language. 594 terms across five languages, so abdeckplane, afdekhoes, antivol and aluminiumskasse all land on the right thing instead of on nothing at all. Tested against 378 real queries, it went from finding the right thing 8% of the time to 78%. Which mostly tells you how bad it was before.

Cheers, and thanks for riding cargo.

— Vince

Found this too long, too short, or want something specific from these updates? Just hit reply.