More flexible than any car: Leipzig’s local authority relies entirely on a courier service using cargo bikes

Sometimes it is small steps that make a city increasingly climate-friendly. Take, for example, the introduction of a cycle courier service by Leipzig City Council in 2020. At the time, there were still doubts amongst those in charge as to whether such a courier service would prove its worth. After all, up until then, everything had been transported by car. But after more than five years, one thing is clear: it works. And so the General Administration Department has now announced that the cycle courier service is being rolled out across the entire city.

What has already applied for the past five years to deliveries in the centre of Leipzig now also applies to all districts: from August, the administration will transport its (internal) mail exclusively by cargo bikes – the four electric vehicles that were most recently in use have thus been phased out for municipal courier deliveries.

And the bicycle couriers have another particular advantage that cars simply do not have.

“Cargo bikes are smaller and more manoeuvrable; they can navigate round building sites or traffic jams more flexibly, and at the properties themselves they are not necessarily reliant on parking spaces close to the road,” explains Anja Soisson, acting head of the Office for Digital Affairs and Organisation within the General Administration Department, regarding the move that has now been implemented. “At the same time, we want to lead by example and play our part in the success of the transport transition in Leipzig.”

There is still a considerable volume of paper-based correspondence

Despite the decline in analogue correspondence, the volume of mail between the 280 locations linked by the courier service (offices, public authorities, institutions and schools) remains considerable, according to the General Administration Department. In 2025, the city centrally received around half a million postal items, including letters and parcels, and distributed them to the respective recipients.

Furthermore, in 2025, around 2.2 million items were dispatched, the majority of which had to be transported via the courier service to the central post office in the New Town Hall and prepared for dispatch by logistics providers such as LVZ-Post or DHL.

In order to integrate all incoming items into the city’s cargo bike courier service, the city entered into a further contract with the Leipzig-based company FULMO Kurierunion GbR, which has been reliably providing the city centre courier service for years and now serves all properties within the city limits by cargo bike. This means that, from August onwards, a total of five couriers on five cargo bikes will be on duty for the City of Leipzig.