Liz Canning & twins on their cargo bike.

Less Car – More Bike!  Californian filmmaker Liz Canning is producing an internationally crowd-sourced feature film named ‘LESS CAR MORE GO’, aimed at revolutionizing some of the fundamental ideas of what a bicycle can do and how people can use them for every-day transport.

Changing such pervasive ideas seems to be the key to getting the urban infrastructure that safe and secure bicycle use requires so this film, to be distributed internationally, is an important and ground-breaking initiative.

Liz currently has a KickStarter campaign running, seeking to raise the US$40,000 required to finish and release the movie. As of this morning something like $32,000 has been raised with 7 days to go!

From the KickStarter website:   “In early 2011, almost three years before the Wall Street Journal dubbed cargo bikes “the New Station Wagon,” filmmaker Liz Canning began making LESS CAR MORE GO. The project is a crowdsourced documentary on the past, present and future of the cargo bike movement, co-directed by over 100 cargo cyclists. A rapidly growing online network of bike lovers from all over the world has shared hours of video footage capturing how cargo bikes change lives…

By interweaving Co-Directors’ footage with interviews Liz has shot with riders, designers, shop owners, advocates and pioneers, LESS CAR MORE GO will tell the tale of the cargo bike, from the original bakfiets and rickshaws in Europe and Asia, to the birth of the Longtail in Australia and Nicaragua, through the year 2014 when sales are doubling and tripling annually, and the global cargo bike culture is exploding!”

A couple of important features of the film likely to be of interest here in Adelaide:

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  The Longbike, Adelaide Advertiser, 1988.

  it gives a major profile to the pioneering design and production efforts of Ian Grayson and Bruce Steer in the late 1970s that saw the development of the Adelaide Longbike, probably the world’s first ‘long tail’ cargo bike, produced right here in our city!

• the film has been produced with high-quality contributions from many community-based film makers from around the world, including several hours of footage shot locally by documentary maker Marty McNicol!

Filming the Semaphore Cargo Bike Gathering.

You might ask ‘why all the noise about cargo bikes’ when they seem thin on the ground in South Australia? Why push the cargo-bike message so hard? The answer is simply that cargo bikes are:

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  Business, families & sustainability.

  generally bigger than your average bike and much more noticeable…

• directly associated with politically attractive imperatives linked to family and business, reducing the costs of daily living and of course…
• epitomize the ‘One Less Car’ message (reduced GHG emissions) and opportunities to build community resilience and sustainability generally.

As such, cargo bikes are emerging as one aspect of community bicycle use that’s particularly hard to ignore at all levels of government and society.  In other words, pushing the ‘cargo bike message’ has an important role to play in advancing key policy, infrastructure and investment causes of value to us all!

I’d encourage bicycle users everywhere, and especially here in Adelaide to consider contributing to Liz’s KickStarter campaign. Any amount you can promise will be worthwhile! Apart from the contribution you’ll be making to bicycle advocacy, there are some great bonus rewards! Check them out.             Ed.