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Old 02-11-18, 12:56 AM
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urbanescapee
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Location: Salt Lake City, UT, USA
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Bikes: 2011 Raleigh Sojourn, 2012 Marin Four Corners, 2013 Soma Saga, 2014 Scott Spark 940, 2017 Brompton H6E, 2016 Trek FX 7.2

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I can think of a couple reasons you don't see suspended cargo bikes: 1) Cargo bikes are already a very niche product in a very niche category. If you think about what percentage of all bikes are purpose built cargo bikes, then you can understand that the reduced demand makes it prohibitive for a broad range of manufactures to produce them at an affordable price. That being said, a cargo bike with all the bells and whistles (read suspension) would put it that much further out of reach. Consider the difference in cost between a fully rigid mtb and a full suspension mtb. You may see that with the high cost of currently available rigid cargo bikes, the added cost of a full suspension cargo bike would be outrageous for most people who would actually want/use one. 2) Likening a cargo bike to a much larger, faster, and heavier machine in terms of suspension applications is an unfair comparison. If you think about the suspension in a car, typically it only has to manage a range of about 10-20% added cargo weight above that of the vehicle itself (e.g. a 4000 lb car with 400-800 lbs of cargo. And most people don't have to get their suspension tuned in their vehicles because the ratio of added weight to base weight is so small and the suspension can handle it just fine. A bicycle, however, is a very different situation. Most bikes, even cargo bikes, don't weigh more than 50-60 lbs while most cargo bike riders (plus cargo) don't likely weigh less than 150 lbs. You can see that with bikes, the ratio is inverse. The cargo weighs much more than the vehicle. Designing a suspension that can appropriately accommodate such a huge range of loading would be very difficult and expensive, and a poorly tuned suspension in that case could actually be very dangerous, creating tremendous instability. You would have to adjust your suspension (as is done on quality mtbs) depending on the weight of the rider plus the load. And because cargo bike can have a load fluctuation of 100-300 lbs, any simple/conventional suspension system simply could not properly accommodate that wide range with respect to the weight of the bicycle.
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