Goal: With RADLÄR, we want to unleash the innovative forces of rural areas in order to have a positive impact on the community far beyond them. We want to address the needs, challenges, ideas and visions of people and enterprises in rural areas in order to work with them to enable economical, emission-free and future-oriented freight transport - cycle logistics transport.

The urgency of implementing a sustainable turnaround in transport and logistics in Germany cannot be overemphasised: The transport sector in particular - emitter of around a fifth of climate-damaging greenhouse gases - is making insufficient progress towards technologies, processes and behaviours that can save and avoid them. In freight logistics, transport by cargo bike is seen as one way of pursuing the sustainability goals of the transport transition. Logistical solutions using this emission-free means of transport are still largely unexplored, especially in rural areas.

RADLÄR will close this research gap. Taking into account the requirements of several and thus diverse rural areas as model regions and communities as well as the current state of research, innovative and generally applicable processes of bicycle logistics are to be developed and comprehensively tested. These processes will open up additional opportunities for commercial transport in rural areas, as the business and realistic integration of cycle logistics will be developed on an academic basis. The target group of the project is therefore both private enterprises that want to develop the use of cycle logistics and public stakeholders that want to support cycle logistics in a targeted manner, for example for sustainability reasons. The RADLÄR project was successfully completed when the possible uses of (cargo) bicycles in rural commercial transport were comprised and assessed.

RADLÄR project page Mobilitätsforum Bund

Coordinator: Fraunhofer FKIE

Partner: Fulda University of Applied Sciences and Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences

Project start: 1 June 2024

End of project: 31 May 2027

Tasks of the Fulda University of Applied Sciences:

• Investigation of those supply chains that use cargo bikes
• Analysis of potential gaps (opportunities) in the model regions investigated
• Derivation of innovative process concepts for cargo bike logistics in rural areas