Europe has spent three decades and tens of millions of euros trying to make shared urban delivery hubs work. At a Clean Mobility Collective dialogue on 29 September, three cargo-bike delivery cooperatives explained what bikes cannot fix on their own, and what cities, governments and the EU could do about it.

Organised by: Clean Mobility Collective / Eraman Repartos Koop · Workers' Leadership · From Operators to Policy: A Dialogue on Making Last-Mile Decarbonisation a Reality · 29 September 2026

Most mornings, the couriers at Gólya Futár in Budapest tell each parcel company how many packages they can take. One day they said 150 and received 220. Another provider has no contractual limit, so couriers who had planned for 150 parcels found 450 waiting. At that point, as the cooperative's speaker put it, "the problem belongs to us": routes have to be reorganised and extra couriers found that same morning.

For years, one provider's drivers photographed parcel labels at the depot and sent the images over Viber, and Gólya's dispatcher typed every address into a spreadsheet by hand. Sometimes the photos never arrived; sometimes parcels were missing from them.

None of this shows up in a pilot budget. Pilot funding pays for the hub, the bikes and the launch photo. Nobody pays for the work of making different providers share one route, or for the dispatching, planning and accounting that keep a delivery service alive. That gap helps explain why so many pilots struggle to become lasting services.

THIRTY YEARS OF PILOTS

Paul Iano, a sustainable mobility advocate, co-founder of Eraman Repartos Koop and the session's moderator, began with the history. In the 1990s, German cities set up about 200 shared depots where carriers handed over goods so that one vehicle could take them into the centre; by 2002, fewer than 15 were still running. The idea returned as the micro-hub, a small city-centre base from which cargo bikes cover the last stretch, and public money followed. By Paul’s count, the EU has contributed at least €64 million to ten urban-logistics and micro-hub projects since 2020, three of which are still running. Each grant pays for three to four years of trials, and none pays to run a hub afterwards.

An ended project is not necessarily a failure, and a running one that is not yet a hub that pays its own way. Private investors, for their part, put billions into quick-commerce companies running small urban warehouses, and many have since closed or pulled out of Western Europe.

For Paul, the pattern has a structural cause. While cities asked operators to work at micro scale in the centre, the parcel industry consolidated into fewer, larger networks and moved its depots to the edge of town in search of economies of scale. His own shorthand: "We want micro, they went macro." The same shift, according to Paul, explains who ends up doing the work.

Commercial cargo-bike firms tend to prefer point-to-point jobs, from a flower shop to a client or a law office to a notary, which pay more per package and come with a direct relationship with the customer. Last-mile parcels for carriers such as DHL, GLS and SEUR pay less and bring more weight, volume and headache, so the few bike operators doing that work at scale are mostly social-economy organisations like the three that presented: Rayon9 in Liège, Gólya Futár in Budapest and Eraman Repartos Koop in Vitoria-Gasteiz.

STREETS AND CONTRACTS BUILT FOR SOMEONE ELSE

Julie Hutsemekers, Business Relations and Communication Manager who presented for Rayon9, a citizen cooperative of about 17 people whose couriers are employees, set out her position plainly: "We are not here as a lobby; we are just sharing what we experience on a daily basis."

Rayon9's trouble starts on the street. Cities plan around two categories, cars and individual cyclists, and professional cargo-bike logistics fits neither. Under the Belgian rules Rayon9 cited, a cycle may be at most one metre wide, and a 1.20 metre trailer is allowed only as a pilot project, with a permit. Push-button lights and planters in bike lanes protect everyday cyclists but cost a loaded cargo bike time and right of way, and a kerb that is a mere annoyance for a cyclist becomes a danger. Rayon9 puts its yearly maintenance costs close to those of a van.

Even with better streets, the market would be thin. In Liège's pedestrian centre, vans can deliver until 11:30 every morning, with no limits outside it. Brussels, by contrast, making up only 11% of Belgium’s population, has a region-wide low-emission zone and accounts for 57% of Belgium's bike deliveries, according to Belgian Cycle Logistics Federation figures cited by Rayon9. Grants and publicity help a little, the cooperative concluded; access rules and public contracts are what create a market.

Liège's own contracts show how far that is from happening. The city bundled delivery into a wider outgoing-mail contract with printing and postage, with no separate delivery lot, and required bidders to show €2 million in turnover in each of the previous three years. With cycle logistics at 1.3% of the Belgian parcel market, by the federation's count, Rayon9 argues that thresholds like these leave no cycle-logistics operator able to qualify.

THE WORK NOBODY IS PAID FOR

Gólya Futár, founded in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, delivers 400 to 500 parcels a day for three parcel companies. Because someone has to, its couriers also dispatch, plan, and keep the accounts, yet only six of the roughly 30 people who work there are cooperative members. The riding itself is hard to sustain: one of the cooperative's best couriers stayed a year and a half before going back to teaching.

The parcels pose a different dilemma. By Gólya's own estimate, about two-thirds of one provider's parcels come from Temu and up to 90% of another's from Shein. "Sometimes the work that financially sustains the organisation is not the work that gives the organisation its social purpose," its speaker and cooperative member, Anikó-Borbála Izsák, said. Someone will deliver those parcels anyway; doing it by bike reduces the environmental impact, and the income keeps the cooperative going.

What that income does not cover is the work of running the organisation. "If the price doesn't cover this organisational work, somebody still has to do it," the speaker said. "It becomes unpaid work, overwork, or work simply doesn't get done."

Eraman, represented by Juan Latorre, partner and member at Eraman Repartos Koop, runs a hub in Vitoria-Gasteiz for several providers, and showed how that strain multiplies when routes are shared. Every provider depends on the least reliable one. A shared route cannot leave until every provider's parcels have arrived and been sorted, so one provider's late delivery to the hub can cost the whole route an hour, and the providers who arrived on time still receive their customers' complaints.

Each company has its own handheld scanner and procedures for riders to learn, and Juan estimates it takes a new rider about three months to become efficient. Someone also has to coordinate operations, track parcels and field calls. This work does not directly generate delivery revenue, yet its cost must be covered by margins that, Juan explained, are not sufficient to pay for it.

Three cooperatives are not a survey of the sector, but the European research they drew on points the same way: most consolidation centres stop running when public funding ends.

A DIFFERENT ROUTE TO SOME OF THE SAME GOALS

Paul’s wider view carried some good news. Measured against what micro-hubs were meant to achieve, he argued, some progress is already happening through other routes. Carriers already bundle parcels on their own networks, electric vans are replacing diesel where cities set zero-emission zones, and pick-up points and lockers are spreading across Europe, gathering dozens of parcels into a single stop. EU duties on cheap imports, including the new €3 levy on low-value parcels, are already reducing the flow of the throwaway goods Gólya described.

The shift has limits. Lockers and pick-up points can help consolidate deliveries, although their environmental benefits depend partly on how people reach them. And one thing has yet to materialise: more cargo bikes doing logistics work. Paul acknowledged that this was disappointing for him as a cargo-bike operator. His point, however, was strategic rather than celebratory: "It's easier to affect something that's already happening than it is to start something from zero." Pick-up points may not look like the micro-hubs originally envisaged, but they can fulfil a similar function. Eraman's experience reinforces the practical case for this approach: supplying pick-up points can be simpler than coordinating home deliveries across multiple providers, potentially helping cover the management costs of shared operations.

City staff and representatives also participated, and some responsible for cycling and logistics described a trial of parcel lockers in social housing, aimed at reducing failed deliveries, consolidating parcel flows and giving residents a reliable delivery point. The operator discontinued the service because it could not establish a sustainable business model. "A successful pilot is not necessarily a viable service," they said. Micro-hubs, cargo bikes and lockers are not solutions in themselves, they argued; what matters is the ecosystem around them, with the right governance, the right economic model and clear roles for public authorities and private operators.

FUND OPERATIONS, NOT JUST INFRASTRUCTURE

Whether deliveries move through shared micro-hubs, established carrier networks or pick-up points, the same question remains: who pays for the coordination, infrastructure and working conditions that make cleaner delivery possible?

The proposals that emerged from the presentations and the collective's findings address that question at three levels.

Cities can act with tools they already hold: zones and time windows that only zero-emission deliveries can use, streets designed for a 1.20-metre trailer, and contracts with a separate delivery lot, a zero-emission requirement and turnover thresholds matched to the lot's value. They can also fund the running of services over several years, rather than another round of pilots.

National governments can secure fair pay and accountability along the subcontracting chain. Belgium already sets a minimum price for parcel delivery under its 2023 parcel law, with a separate rate for bikes, and its Constitutional Court has upheld it. Germany has made the company at the top of the chain liable for parcel couriers' pay and social-security contributions since 2019.

The EU can make carriers' systems talk to each other through a common data format for parcel handovers, drawing on India's open logistics network and the EU's existing electronic freight information rules, and can write procurement rules small operators can meet into the proposed Public Procurement Act.

As Paul put it: "We don't need you to build us a locker. We need an ecosystem that supports our work more generally."

Cargo bikes can deliver Europe's parcels with fewer emissions. But three decades of consolidation schemes suggest that the vehicles and hubs are only part of the solution. The harder task is building the economic, operational and policy conditions that allow clean delivery services and the people running them to thrive.