Urban Arrow FamilyNext Pro Review: Our Family Cargo Bike Life in Toronto

If you've ever white-knuckled a double drop-off in city traffic, circled the block six times for parking, or handed wet wipes into the back seat because someone got car sick again, this post is for you.

This spring our family brought home an Urban Arrow FamilyNext Pro and a Gazelle Ultimate C380, and they quietly replaced almost every car trip we make in Toronto. We barely touched our car ALL summer. Camp drop-offs, park picnics, ice cream missions, lakefront cruising, and family adventures all over this city now happen on two wheels.

Here's the full story, and my honest Urban Arrow FamilyNext Pro review after a full summer of daily riding with a 5-year-old and a 7-year-old.

Last summer we spent two weeks in Amsterdam with our kids, and it rearranged something in my brain.

Everywhere we looked, families were just... living on bikes. Parents pedalling kids to school in front-box cargo bikes. Groceries, dogs, grandparents, birthday cakes, all moving through the city on two wheels, in regular clothes, in the rain, completely unbothered. We rented a cargo bike ourselves and rode along the canals with the kids in the box for 2 weeks.

My husband and couldn't stop thinking about it. Not the bikes themselves, but the ease. Nobody was circling for parking. Nobody was strapping a screaming child into a five-point harness for a six-minute drive. The bike was not a workout or a statement. It was just how families got around.

So we decided to bring that European lifestyle back home with us to Toronto. This spring, we became a two-e-bike family.

There are lots of ways to bike with kids: seats, trailers, longtails. We chose a front-loading e-cargo bike (also called a bakfiets, the Dutch style) for one big reason: the kids sit in front of you.

That changes everything. You can see them, hear them, and keep an eye on them the entire ride. They get a front-row seat to the whole city instead of the back of my head. Do they still argue over who sits where? Obviously. But nobody has once asked "are we there yet," and nobody has gotten car sick. For my kids, who get queasy within minutes in the back of a car, that alone would have justified the whole thing.

And it's worth mentioning what we rode before this: a trailer hitched to the back of my bike. The drag on that thing was insane. It was heavy, I never stopped feeling uneasy pulling my kids behind me on city streets completely out of my sight, and they felt pretty trapped back there too. The front box is the complete opposite. They're up front, they see everything I see, and they have so much more freedom.

The FamilyNext Pro is Urban Arrow's newest family model, and it's built exactly for this stage of life: kids who are too big for strollers but too small (and too slow) to ride their own bikes everywhere.

1. The box. Both kids ride on the front bench with proper seatbelts, and my 7-year-old climbs in and buckles herself. The box is made of Urban Arrow's signature lightweight foam, so it's sturdy without being a tank, and there's still room around their feet for backpacks and groceries.
2. It hauls whatever the day throws at us. Groceries, beach gear, a friend from camp, and our dog Frodo, who jumped in once and now believes the box is his. And when mom's legs are done, mom fits too. I have personally confirmed this.
3. The Bosch e-assist. Toronto is hillier than people think. With two kids and a week of groceries on board, the motor makes the bike feel almost empty. Ninety pounds of kids feel like nothing, even on the climbs.
4. The rain cover. The accessory I underestimated most. It comes off in seconds, snaps back on just as fast, and turns the box into a warm, dry little pod. It's what stretches your riding season from "nice summer days" to almost year round.
5. The kids' reaction. This is the part no spec sheet captures. My kids beg to take the bike. Nobody has ever begged to get into a car.

No Urban Arrow FamilyNext Pro review would be complete without the honest caveats:

1. It's a big bike. You'll want to think about where it lives; ours parks like a small stroller-garage situation.
2. There's a short learning curve to steering a front-loader. Give yourself one kid-free practice ride; by the second outing it feels natural.
3. Buy a serious lock (or two). Buy a serious lock (or two). Our setup is the ABUS Granit CityChain plus the ABUS Alarmbox, a little motion-sensing alarm that mounts on the frame: jostle the bike and it lets out an ear-splitting shriek that makes anyone within a block turn around. For a bike this valuable parked outside a splash pad, that combo has bought us a lot of relaxed afternoons. Ask your local dealer what they recommend for your neighbourhood.

Full specs are on the Urban Arrow FamilyNext Pro page.

1. The belt drive. Instead of a chain there's a carbon belt, which means no grease on your pants and basically no maintenance. For a bike that gets ridden daily, this matters more than any spec.
2. Stepless shifting. No clunking through gears. The ride is so smooth, so fast, it just glides.
3. The battery. It goes days between charges with the way we ride. Charging is a weekly chore, not a daily one.
4. The same Bosch motor as the Urban Arrow. Both our bikes are e-bikes on the same system, so both parents ride at the same pace and nobody arrives sweaty.
5. It takes a child seat. We added a Thule seat on the back, which turned the Gazelle into the perfect one-kid bike and made mommy-daughter date days around the city our new thing.

Camp drop-offs (and school runs): Two kids, two backpacks, one bike, zero parking. Door to door it's genuinely competitive with driving, and infinitely more pleasant. While everyone else sits in traffic, we're flying right past it.

Groceries and errands: The box swallows a full grocery run with both kids still in it.

Weekends: High Park, the waterfront, beaches, ice cream missions. Places that used to mean a parking headache are now the easy option.

Date days: My daughter and I recently did a full mommy-daughter day on the Gazelle: got our nails done, went shopping, lunch in Little Portugal, and of course ice cream at what I firmly believe is the best ice cream in Toronto (Disco Ice Cream & Cookies). Door to door without breaking a sweat while she chatted away behind me.

Frodo: Our little Cavalier King Charles Spaniel dog comes too. He's very smug about it.

We got both bikes at Curbside Cycle at 412 Bloor Street West, and I can't recommend the experience enough. They built the bikes, installed the rain cover before we arrived, walked us through locks and security for our neighbourhood, and let us test ride with the kids before committing. If you're anywhere near Toronto, go talk to them, and if you're elsewhere, Urban Arrow's dealer locator and the Gazelle Canada site will point you to a shop near you.

Here's where this Urban Arrow FamilyNext Pro review lands: a cargo bike is a real investment, and I won't pretend otherwise. What changed my math was noticing how many of our car trips were short hops: camp, groceries, the park, all just a few minutes away. Those are the trips the bike quietly took over, and they happen to be the ones where loading kids into car seats and hunting for parking hurt the most.

But the part I didn't expect is how good it would make us feel. There's a freedom to it that's hard to describe until you're gliding along the lakefront with your kids pointing at swans. We're outside every day, we're moving our bodies without calling it exercise, and everyone arrives everywhere in a better mood. The fresh air alone has been worth it.

It's also made our city bigger. We go downtown way more than we used to, because on the bike it often takes less time than driving and there's no parking battle at the other end. Neighbourhoods we used to skip because getting there was annoying are suddenly an easy ride away. We're exploring more of Toronto with the kids than we did in years of owning a car.

We still have our car and we still use it. But "let's go" on the bike takes about 90 seconds, and that ease has changed our daily life more than anything else we've bought in years.

Can two kids really fit? Yes. The bench seats two with seatbelts, and there's still cargo room. It can even fit me with the kids when we need it to.

What about winter?The rain cover plus warm layers stretches the season much further than we expected. And it's actually been a great way to get us outside and moving in the colder months.

Do you need to be fit? No. That's the point of the Bosch motor. You choose how much of a workout you want, and "none" is a valid setting.