​Bikes with massive buckets, where toddlers huddle together, buckled amid backpacks and bags of groceries. 
Bikes with long seats, hauling tweens as they cradle saxophones or hockey gear.
Custom 3D-printed accessories, blinking LED strips, mounts that can lug stuff weighing hundreds of pounds.
Glance at the growing network of protected bike lanes in the Boston area, and you’ll see it all.
As electric-assisted bikes improve — and morph, adapt, and proliferate — parents say they are finding it easier than ever to do most anything that once required four wheels on just two. For this crew, minivans are out. E-cargo bikes are in.

 

A decade ago, when Amanda Rychel was rolling up to the day-care drop-off in Somerville atop a cargo bike, she said, “I was an oddity.”
But other parents were intrigued. She never got stuck in Somerville’s often snarled traffic, never had to circle the block for a parking space. All her kids’ supplies seemed to travel just fine — no trunk necessary.

“A lot has changed in 10 years,” said Rychel, a 51-year-old project manager. “Now there’s a whole fleet of cargo bikes picking up their kids.”

Like many bike-focused parents in the area, father-of-four Cody Dunne Scott, 40, still has a car, but barely uses it. He’s “car-light,” as parents here say, pivoting most of the time to using a bike that he pedals, but that has an electric motor that adds the extra power he needs to go long distances or up steep inclines with the little ones in tow.
His, like many now seen crisscrossing the city, has a large bucket in the front where the kids can sit.

“The bulk of the stuff I do up to an hour bike ride away with the kids, I throw ‘em in and cruise,” Scott said. “It’s a lot more fun for the kids than being in the car. They get to have the wind in their face, which they like.”

In the summer, he carries spray bottles to mist them if they get too hot. In the rain, he installs a plastic cover.

He once took the whole family on a 60-mile “bikepacking” trip through the Boston suburbs, and recently — to the amusement of airport security — used his e-bike to pick up his oldest son at Logan.

On his trips steering his bucket of children, Scott has developed a disciplinary approach to fit the form.

“If they start fighting, which kids do when they’re in close quarters, I have to stop and deal with it,” he said. “But I can stop virtually anywhere and do a timeout in the wild. Then we keep going.”

Many parents are still skeptical, of course. About the cost, the logistical hurdles, or the safety, given the hazards on the road for bikers, and the number of people who have been injured on, or by, the electric-assisted devices.

But for each conundrum — What about hauling my kid’s viola, or the gear for baseball practice? What if it’s sleeting in February? — The parenting-by-bike community has come up with a solution.

Modern e-bikes have electric motors that are designed to kick in and provide a supplement when human pedal power alone isn’t enough. The frames are strong enough to haul hundreds of pounds of people and gear. Plastic rain guards clip on to protect kids from the elements, and studded tires keep traction on icy patches. And riders can use waterproof mitts on the handlebars to keep their digits warm and dry even in a downpour.

Parents said they ride slowly and carefully, and that with the right planning to avoid roads without protected lanes, they largely feel safe and comfortable on the road.

Taking a long trip? Parents said they simply take the e-bike on the commuter rail or pack it onto the ferry. Or maybe they get a rental car, they say, at a cost that’s still a fraction of what a car payment would be.

“We’re widening the Overton window of what people consider reasonable,” said Nate Sharpe, a Cambridge father of twins and a local advocate for the car-free lifestyle.

For parents still clinging to their cars, a grassroots effort to nudge them onto bike seats is also underway.

There are regular Family Bike Rides, where parents come to learn about the safest routes, and a local Facebook group, called Cargo Bikes of Camberville, where they swap tips.

“The reality is that every person who has an e-bike becomes an e-bike evangelist because you can’t ride an e-bike around and not realize this is the best way to get around Boston,” Schmidt said.

Big, bulky bikes packed with kids have been a growing presence on Cambridge’s streets.

A city-led study that counted the number of children passing through 16 Cambridge intersections on bikes on certain days, either on their own or as passengers, increased nearly fourfold between 2014 and 2022, from 186 to 641.

The shift comes as bike lanes spread rapidly, and cities make new efforts to do things like plow bike lanes when it snows.

Enabling parents to go car-free year-round has been a city goal, said Stephanie Groll, Cambridge’s assistant commissioner of transportation planning.

“If you need to drive, that’s OK,” she said. “But we just want it to be possible to choose not to.”

Adrienne Palomeque, a 37-year-old mom who lives in Porter Square, made that choice this year.

She’d always been a committed cyclist, she said. “I rode my bike up until the day I gave birth to my son.”

As he grew, hauling her son up steep hills became too onerous. And with a second child on the way, relying solely on a bike seemed impossible.

So did buying an e-bike to lighten the load, as they are significantly pricier than a normal bicycle.

“It was just not in our budget,” she said.

Then she and her husband applied to Cambridge’s bike lottery program, which gave vouchers to randomly picked income-eligible residents.

Both got one, which gave them $3,000 each to spend on e-cargo bikes.

Already, they’ve both stopped using their car almost entirely. Her husband recently used his bike to take their son hiking in the Middlesex Fells. They’ve been to a community pool and a Boston splash pad, without any of the hassle of getting there by car.

“My son sits in the back of the bike with a speaker and he just goes, ‘Wooo!’” she said. “We really can’t believe that this is our lifestyle.”

So far, 128 Cambridge residents have used vouchers to buy bikes, 93 of them electric.

“It’s not necessarily always coming down to a choice,” said Tiffany Cogell, interim executive director of the Boston Cyclists Union and a founding organizer of Boston’s Ride for Black Lives. “There are equity issues at play that keep people from going car-free, even if they wanted to.”

Parents in Mattapan, she said, might find the roadways too risky to bike with kids aboard, or might live so far from work that traveling by bike isn’t feasible.

Still, she said, she has heard growing excitement about the possibilities presented by e-bikes and new bike lanes being installed in the city.

“If there was safe infrastructure in a meaningful way,” she said, “there would be a lot more people with children taking that leap.”

Spencer Buell can be reached at spencer.buell@globe.com. Follow him @SpencerBuell.