FWIW
The first two paragraphs of the NPR report:
If you live in any major city or suburb in the U.S., you may have noticed more and more parents hauling their kids around on bulky cargo bicycles. Some families are ditching their second car, forgoing a minivan, or going car-free altogether.
Cargo bikes have been around for more than a century — and they're popular elsewhere on the globe. But until a few years ago, they were all but forgotten in North America. Now they're making a comeback.
It certainly sounds like a positive trend on cargo bike use by families in the U.S will be addressed in the article.
And it
is addressed by several people in the cargo bike business who provide personal anecdotes that they see more of them around.
But they as well as the NPR writer provided no data to indicate a trend at all; nor any evidence (not even an anecdote) of families who actually ditched their second car, forgoing a minivan, or going car-free altogether thanks to their use of cargo bikes. Of course readers of the article are entitled to believe that a few cherry picked anecdotes from cargo bike boosters provide evidence of a trend that the reader would like to believe is true.
Bottom Line: The article is a nice feel good piece about how some people find they like to use their cargo bike and that suitable bicycling facilities enable that use.
I would look for a better reference if I wanted a cite a
growing trend in the use of cargo bike by families as support for advocacy for expanded bicycling facilities, or use this article as reference of a g
rowing trend just because I think more use of cargo bikes by families would be a good thing.