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Grocery Delivery Lowers Carbon Dioxide Emissions Over Individual Trips
vinces99 writes "Those trips to the store can take a chunk out of your day and put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. But now University of Washington engineers have found that using a grocery delivery service can cut carbon dioxide emissions by at least half when compared with individual household trips to the store. Trucks filled to capacity that deliver to customers clustered in neighborhoods produced the most savings in carbon dioxide emissions, but there are even benefits with delivery to rural areas."
Will this grocery delivery service discriminate against "atheist" foods?
When I go to the grocery, I walk there. I doubt that any delivery service can be more efficient. However, to be able to shop in that way, the supermarket must be not more than 10-20 min away from home (by foot or by bike).
Jeez, is it so hard NOT to take the car for groceries?
So it uses less gas and generates less emmisions if one truck comes from a single point into a area along a planned path and delivers to everyone instead of having all those individuals drive from the area to the single point?
WOW I would of thought it was the other way.
It is good that these people spent all this time and money to prove that common thinking was all wrong.
Well, the truck can deliver the goods to a local market. Then, you can go to that market using your feet or even a bike. I guess it is even more green. It is the way our grandparents did. Why do we different? Because we have plenty of cheap energy and it is more comfortable the other way.
It might change when the energy will not be that cheap, though. I am pretty pessimistic at the idea some environmental enlightenment will win against laziness...
Video of some good progressive thrash music
Who shops at major groceries anymore? I get most of my food at the farmers market. I like to pick my own produce, not phone it in.
Grocery stores would fight it. There's no "oh i want it" to the same degree if you can keep a list in your phone every time you run out of something and it comes to the door twice a week. It would eliminate overhead, but who really needs grocery stores if a warehouse just loads the stuff on a truck and brings it to you. Now with fruits and veggies you'll probably want to pick them out so they dont give you the rejects.
For boxed stuff and canned goods, why not? I mean, my dad told me stories of the milk man/soda man in Brooklyn. Small towns have had a grocer kid who would bring you stuff for a tip. I even recall a similar service failing to gain traction here. I know there is Schwanns. That handsome delivery boy could be the bane of husbands everywhere!
I want the milk that is newest, the meat without marbling, the pear without bruises, and the beets without rotting leaves.
I'm sure it benefits the store to provide me whatever is oldest and/or least desired. If I don't buy more food to compensate, throwing out half of it, there may even be an environmental benefit. (less food waste if people eat the moldy food) No thanks. I want the good stuff.
Which part of you grew up in Austin? Ha ha ha. I crack myself up.
Fundamentally, environmental problems are economic problems: how to minimize environmental damage at minimal cost. Economic theory points to pollution taxes as the best solution. So while I disagree with the articles conclusion that governments should give incentives for ordering groceries by delivery, this kind of study does point people and companies in the direction of how to efficiently reduce pollution once the right incentives (pollution taxes) are provided.
And of course, in the meantime it's good for people to know how to efficiently reduce their own pollution even though there is no financial incentive to do so.
I'll tell you who: normal people.
Only people with too much money and time on their hand will go buy high-quality meat or other farmer products regularly.
If you want to be even more efficient how about you do a "Foxconn" - live, eat, etc at your workplace and do away with most grocery trips completely.
You'd get greater economies of scale and reduce CO2 emissions. But is that the priority?
I'd personally prefer to leave the cooking to the pros and specialists. In general that's inefficient however it's not 100% guaranteed that eating out has to be more inefficient and environmentally unfriendly:
Eat in:
farm->distribution center/warehouse->supermarket->your kitchen/fridge->your dining table.
Eat out:
farm ->distribution center/warehouse ->restaurant kitchen/fridge->restaurant dining table.
If everyone drives a car to restaurants and makes many such trips then it generates more CO2. But if most customers can walk in or its just a short detour from their main journey then it might actually be more efficient.
My groceries consist mostly of perishable goods (haven't bought cans or frozen foods in recent memory, rather low on boxes, packets or jugs). One has to wonder: how much do damaged fruit that rot before they can be eaten, contribute to carbon emissions (ok, ok, methane)? I often stop by the shop on my way from work to home, so not much extra fuel used there. But I select my produce for maximum freshness (so they last as long as possible). The more they are handled (unloading, packing, bagging, ...) the more the quality is impacted, because it seems where I live most laborers doing these low-wage, low-training chores just don't care. I somehow doubt that the delivery truck will take the same extra care to get me the freshest stuff.
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
TFH (headline) mentions specifically that it is more efficient than single individual trips. It does not make any comparison to public transport. Honestly Slashdot, sometimes...
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I ride my bike to pick up my groceries like most sane people.
That's great for you; single-person-urbanite-centric much? ;)
I used to do the same when I was a student and lived relatively close to the supermarkets. A few years down the line, I/we shop for three people once a week. That can be a good forty kilos depending on what we buy.
A little more on topic - and perhaps more importantly, these grocery deliveries also save *time* - life's most important resource.
America is a large spread out place, and many people need to transport two hundred $ worth of groceries sometimes twice a week. Do that on a bike 4 miles twice a week, in Texas..... with three kids.
Use a bike trailer.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
let me introduce you to : http://bakfiets.nl/nl/modellen/cargobike/lang/
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
How about we build thorium reactors and waste all the cheap energy we please! China is... with our research.
Here's my grocery getter, loaded down with groceries. I doubt that truck beats me in the carbon department.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
exactly the point he was making. buy smaller quantities more often and you get to enjoy something known in the rest of the world as fresh fruit, fresh vegetables and fresh bread. also, what's wrong with drinking tap water? (hence the title - America-centric much?)
I've found that if you murder people, they stop emitting CO2 almost entirely. So really, serial killers are the best environmentalists.
If they don't dispose carefully though they can increase methane emissions, which is even worse. Seriously these serial killers should investigate the environmental impacts of acid baths, cremation, etc. My gut feeling says that using the bodies for livestock feed or eating them yourself is the most environmentally sound approach
If you're single and living by yourself, and there's a store within walking distance near your home or workplace, and you're physically fit, and the weather is half-decent, fine. How much can you lug in a couple of shopping bags? A week's worth of groceries for 2 or more people is not going to fit in a shopping bag, or in the itty-bitty basket on your bicycle.
My initial reaction to the article is... like... dohhh. This is what's known as "The travelling salesman problem". No, it's not a joke or a movie... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem
> The travelling salesman problem (TSP) or travelling salesperson problem
> asks the following question: Given a list of cities and the distances between
> each pair of cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly
> once and returns to the origin city? It is an NP-hard problem in combinatorial
> optimization, important in operations research and theoretical computer science.
In this case substitute residences in the same city for locations in multiple cities. But the principle is the same. Given today's computing power, it should be easy to plan an optimum route for delivering groceries to several customers in a geographic area. Depending on how the truck is loaded, and how many doors it has, the groceries will need to be loaded in either the same order as the deliveries, or the reverse order.
While we're at it, hasn't this problem been addressed by other delivery systems? TV/furniture/bed stores (or the companies they subcontract out to) will obviously want their delivery guys to deliver pieces of furniture to multiple customers, in the shortest time possible, assuming hourly pay.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
The whole paper is self evident. Yes a large glass of water is going to hold less water than 100 shot glasses.
But it all depends on everyone using a car for their shopping vs. getting stuff delivered. Using public transportation is not even mentioned in the article, presumably because they know this 'research' is bullshit. Doing grocery shopping is only one of a whole multitude of things you can do when you own your means of transportation, and taking it further and using a non-CO2 producing means of transportation seriously fucks their research up. So they ignore it.
For this 'research' to have any merit they'd need to look at grocery delivery coupled with public transportation, and then correct for all the shit people can't do with public transportation alone. Or correct for the seriously gaping holes in their premise.
And all that aside, they seem to think that any truck can be packed to ~95% space efficiency, and that an optimal route through a neighborhood is always trivially solvable. Yet more bullshit. Packing a truck efficiently is a fucking nightmare and solving the Knapsack Problem is not going to help you much unless you're in the business of selling perfectly square cardboard boxes (in which case transporting them folded would make more sense, so yeah).
... whatever
It looks like I'd have to fill that bike about 8 to 10 times per week to feed my family. Each week I have about 4 large carts of food, overfilled top and bottom. Sometimes I hang things off the side. Sometimes I get a second cart.
I don't even bother with beer or bottled water. Each day is about 2 gallons of milk, 2 half-gallons of orange juice, perhaps 8 eggs on average (highly variable, can be about 2 dozen), 10 to 15 bananas, a pair of chickens or a turkey or a goose or similar...
Motor vehicles are behind about 15% all CO2 emissions. Out of that I have seen numbers ranging from 40-75% coming from private transporation, the typical definition of car. Let's assume the upper range and say that private car transportation emits about 10% of all CO2 in the world. How much of that is done buying groceries? I know personally it is less than half, but for fun, lets say my work and my kids spare-time activities are really close and my grocery store is really far away, and I spend half of my driving to and from the grocery store. That would mean that 5% of all CO2 emissions come from driving to and from grocery stores. This is most likely exaggerated quite a bit, but let's stay with the upper boundaries.
If they can cut grocery-related emissions by half, that would mean a 2.5% reduction in emissions give an absolute perfect scenario. The real number is probably closer to somewhere between 0 and 1%.
The people doing this research are not morons for doing the research, but they are morons for publishing it thinking it adds to the debate about AGW.
In fact, given that private car transportation is the source of 10% or so of carbon emissions, any person who uses changes in private car transportation as a solution to AGW is mathematically retarded and should be removed from the discussion. The reduction in CO2 emissions that can be achieved targeting private transportation are statistically insignificant, and most of the "solutions" are far worse than the problem. Electrical cars for example, would increase CO2 emissions in most of the world, not reduce them since most of the electricity they run on is being produced by coal-fueled power plants.
But the food itself is carbon neutral. As much carbon was absorbed then it was growing as you breathe out. The only carbon cost is that extra required by the equipment to grow and deliver it.
one gas guzzling tuck.
I'll assume you meant truck.
Most of the places that deliver round here use electric vans to do so - which is exactly the right use-case for electric vehicles.
- The van's delivery route can be planned to ensure it's back at the depot well before the battery runs out - so no range anxiety.
- Once the van arrives back at the depot, the battery can be swapped and the van can be back on the road again; the old battery can be recharged ready for the next swap-out (if you're operating a fleet, it makes sense to have more batteries than vehicles; if you're running a car domestically, it doesn't).
Not everything that can be measured matters; Not everything that matters can be measured.
Really? A grocery deliver has less carbon emission than me using public transportation (tram) on my way back form work?
And this would still be true even if you used your car back from work and stopped on the way to load up some groceries.
And I'd think a majority of people fetch their groceries on the way back from work, that's why so many supermarkets are near major arteries...
The only "extra" carbon dioxide emitted is the one spent while looking for a parking spot, i.e. negligible.
... or batching it up with other trips (such as: "back from work")
I'd consider that decidedly INsane. You have fun riding your bike to the grocery store 4 times a week, and waiting in line over and over, just to feed yourself, when one car trip a month would do the job even better. I'd bet YOU are the one producing more carbon dioxide with your horrendously inefficient lifestyle.
Besides that, your story immediately reminds me of the Great Blizzard of 1888, where hundreds of people, mostly in New York, died, because they depended on buying groceries several times a week, just like you.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
You still don't have much of a family. If the kids leave home at age 18 and don't come back, an unimpressive rate of 1 kid every other year should get you to about 9 kids. With decent performance you can have 15 kids. Again, this is assuming they leave the nest at 18 and don't come back.
This is old news for Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, and Orthodox Jews. Protestants are starting to get on it too now, with the Quiverful movement. You may have to start your own movement if you don't believe... call it the "r-selection movement" maybe. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R-selection for why)
Actually, "packing a truck perfectly" is more difficult than the mere "knapsack problem" (where it is enough if everything fits, but order doesn't matter), because you need to make sure that the boxes are in the right order for easy retrieval during delivery. You don't want to have to completely unload and repack the truck at each stop, because the boxes you need next happen to be at the bottom and furthest away from the truck door...
ok, maybe not for a family, but for an individual student, this is definately feasible. I did it myself when I was studying in Palo Alto, and it wasn't even a proper backpack. Just beware of not packing too tightly if you've bought eggs...
Actually, "packing a truck perfectly" is more difficult than the mere "knapsack problem" (where it is enough if everything fits, but order doesn't matter)
Which is what I said.
And yes, there are much, much harder problems in packing than 'will this box fit into this truck' (the basic definition of the Knapsack Problem). And as you mention, the route needs to be prepared before you can pack the truck, or you risk having to unload some or all of your goods at each stop. Coupled with weight distribution problems, the best they can hope for with this research is to not always drive around half empty.
... whatever
My thoughts exactly. It is miles to the nearest grocery store for me, and even a mile just to the nearest bus stop. I have to buy many heavy things to feed my family, so it would be impossible to do that sort of thing walking or on a bike. Acting like a jackass implying everyone is too lazy to walk or use bikes is naive at best.
That bike looks like it could barely handle more than a few bags of groceries. When you're buying for a family and not just yourself, that is pitifully small.
Must be nice living very close to a supermarket.
Regular people? Is this a trick question?
Public transport isn't a viable option for many in this country. You're acting like the research isn't applicable, when it is really applicable to a substantial portion, if not a majority. I'd also be surprised if most of the companies that deliver groceries don't use a few standard sizes of boxes that are easy to pack into the truck efficiently on their own, and pick sizes that are pretty well matched up to the size of the goods within.
I get my groceries on a bicycle. Beat that.
one gas guzzling tuck.
I'll assume you meant truck.
No, he meant fuck. A gas guzzling fuck is kind of like 69, but connected to the source of gas. Some people find it works better if they eat beans or cabbage beforehand.
Are you really comparing her physical disability to your decision to live in a shitty auto-centric neighborhood?
You can't spell "oneiromancy" without "roman".
the manufacturer says : 80Kg max in the front compartment. I have seen people drive it with 2 kids AND groceries in it.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
GP here. I live in a "shitty auto-centric neighborhood" because I'm not a fucking hipster and prefer to pick a neighborhood based on the schools and neighbors than the walkability of the great western retail bonanza. See, we don't all live in Manhattan, and don't want to. My daughters go outside and play and climb trees in our yard. They don't "go to the park" to see that the world has things that grow and smell and live. They go to the backyard and pick strawberries and tomatoes and onions.
There's more to life than your hipster, spending-oriented lifestyle. "shitty, auto-centric neighborhood" isn't auto-centric, it's family-centric. We're a lot closer to our neighbors now than when we were one wall apart. Life's funny that way. We don't have to pretend that people don't exist to create a feeling of privacy. Yes, I could move back to the city, spend a lot more money, and have a worse quality of life, and brag about being able to walk to everything my consumerist heart wanted, but that's just not what life is about.
They make no mention of public transportation because that would point a finger at one of the many gaping holes in their premise. Constraining your problem areas to a very tiny subset does not make your research any more valid...
Hahahahahahaha hahaha.... Hahahaha... Wait a second while I peel myself off the floor here. Heh... Okay, what was that you were saying about private transportation being a tiny "very tiny subset" of people's transport usage? Also, the equation you gave your third-grader is wrong; you need separate variables for distance1 and distance2, and at that point the equation is not solvable until you do some research to determine what those distances would be in various real-world situations. Like, say, the research described in TFA.
I live in a community-centric suburb in Sydney's inner east. Rushcutters Bay Park is everyone's backyard. The kids play there, we run and play soccer there, we bust out musical instruments and dance. We're considerate and social because we have to be, and we're a stronger community for it. I walk home from work (about 3.5km), and I can easily pick up groceries on the way. My wife can walk three minutes to the local supermarket to pick something up, too. There's a bus stop literally in front of our building, it's six minutes to walk to the railway station. It's a good place for a family.
Using public transportation is not even mentioned in the article, presumably because they know this 'research' is bullshit.
Presumably, because people find it annoying when someone hops on a bus with arms full of groceries taking up already precious tight space on the bus (for many popular lines) and they look like either poor or crazy people. Or, on the other hand, nobody actually wants to take public transit to do their grocery shopping, because they're limited to a couple bags of groceries, public transit takes fucking forever (walk to the nearest stop, wait for the next bus, take the bus to the store -- or worse if you're unlucky, get off the bus and walk to another line and wait for it to show up for your transfer, then take that to your store -- then do it all on the return trip and hope that all the bus lines operate during the time that you actually have available to do your shopping and not later at night or earlier in the morning).
Or, more, that nobody wants to do their shopping via public transit, because cramming yourself into a tin-can alongside people with mental problems talking to themselves, trying to throw themselves out the bus-window, doing crack, shooting heroine, scratching tags into the bus window, carving shit into the backs of seats, blasting their music, having screaming-loud-multi-person-conversations a foot from your ear, lugging their packs of screaming children around, and always being one bad evening away from a bunch of dipshits losing their shit and brawling on the bus amid the other passengers is all an absolutely fucking hideous way to spend your time when you can either just drive or even just put in a regular order and have a nice clean friendly person show up at your door and cart your groceries to your kitchen for you.
Let's worship the self, the icon of western consumerism. "I want" "I want" "I want" ... music to the ears of the capitalists destroying our society, coming from the spoiled progressives feeding them.
Oh by the way, the dirty capitalists want your money. It doesn't benefit them to provide you the oldest or least desired. You're the customer most likely to leave them for a competing service. They're smarter than you.
Very wrong.
First the person was talking about the quality of the items, and was pretty sure he wouldn't get them as he liked them by delivery. And I agree with his statement it does benefit those grocery stores to give the old items away first. While my background is more restaurant work, my family has a big history of Grocery Store work. (Family owned one for a few decades). First in, First out. That is the motto. And if you get be able to sell stuff sight unseen, then all the better to give the passed over stuff to. You don't make any money if you can't sell all the product. There are a few exceptions, but they don't really matter in this convo.
Now my experience is in restaurants, which isn't much different. As long as you don't think the person will get sick from eating it, you use it. Fish smell bad? Put some lemon juice on it. Meat smelling a little sour? Rinse it off, it's still good.
Capitalist want to make as much money as they can, with as little cost to them as possible, using other peoples money. They do not care if you are happy, after all, look at Wall Street. Look at the big Bank scandal. The capitalist that were responsible got big bonuses while normal people lost their houses...
Be seeing you...
This study assumes of course that you are at home, go to the store by car and get back. But people will also streamline their transportation routes. I, for example, always go to the store when coming back from work. It's on the same way, so the added emissions here are just me stopping and starting my car.
I'm sure many other people are in the same case.
That's probably very awesome in the Netherlands, but in the states someone would either swerve their car into the bike lane and run you over for a laugh or steal/damage your bike the moment you locked it up and went into the supermarket. There are a couple types of hipster bikes that people ride around without too much trouble, but I think this style of bike is just a bit over the line of what people will let you ride around without feeling obligated to harass you for it.
You might have more pride in yourself if you exercised.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Of course it is America-centric. In a little city/town or even country that you can walk across during lunch, you're not going to have nearly the same issues as the vast expanses you have in the states, where it can take 20-60 minutes to drive across the city and you have fewer stores at greater distances. There aren't really "corner markets" in the states (except maybe in NYC, where the density of the population sort of makes every block almost a world unto itself).
I also don't see how bicycling or walking to the store many times a week instead of once every week or two (seriously, do you know how much time you're going to be spending if you're going shopping every couple of days?!) is going to make your fruit or other goods fresher. Most Americans don't have much choice but to shop at the nearest local supermarket. Most supermarkets do not carry great produce or meat. Everything is heavily treated by chemicals and modified such that the produce is large, pretty, shiny, handles travel over long distances with minimal damage, and as a result absolutely fucking tasteless. Same pretty much goes for meats and dairy.
If you want actual healthy, delicious, fresh produce and meat, you have to go to something like a farmer's market and a butcher. Usually separate places. Usually even further away and less frequently found than the supermarkets. That means more trips to more separate places and you're not going to do that on foot or by bicycle.
Call it "america-centric" if you like. It *is* america-centric. In case you didn't notice, it's washington.edu. Can you guess where Washington state is?
I mean, seriously, this is almost like when I hear my european friends laugh and ridicule Americans, in general, because they aren't "well traveled". After all, my european friends often lived in places that were an hour or two drive away from about five other countries. Guess what? I can drive about 24-30hrs non-stop in every direction and still not leave this country, because it's enormous.
Yes, it would be fantastic if we all were able to live in small cloistered communities with all of our necessary goods, services, recreational spots, and employment within a six block walk and then we could all have super-gigabit internet to every one of our houses and nobody would have to own a car and we could all live in tiny row-houses and so on. Unfortunately, that is not the case. People - even in heavily populated areas - often live 30-90 minutes away from where they go to work and are a decent drive away from their nearest shitty supermarket and because of their long stressful commutes and long work weeks and long work hours (no siestas or endless bank holidays, here), the last thing they have time for is a daily three mile walk to the supermarket to shop for groceries that they're then going to go home and cook with all that imaginary free time they have available.
I've seen many families who barely even have time to sit down and eat, much less cook an actual real meal, and even much less go shopping every day or two on top of that.
Oh - and the tap water -- pretty shitty in many places. I would presume that's why a lot of people buy bottled water (we all know that bottled water just comes from a local water source in a factory, usually, but at least it is filtered). I don't really know why people don't just filter their water in their home, though. Cheaper and a lot less hassle.
Yes, but can you tell us where you get your hemp sandles, tight lady-jeans, and smug sense of self-satisfaction?
Congratulations, now go make^H^H^H^Hlose a billion $$$!
Safeway is starting to offer this as a service; however, like WebVan, they reserve the right to substitute "equivalent" goods when they feel it's necessary.
When WebVan did that, we ended up with something with peanut oil in it instead of canola oil, which it's lucky we caught, or someone could have died.
When Safeway does it, it's going to be replacing name brands with Safeway brands, and it is more or less *always* be necessary, since they are sending the vans from the distribution center, which only stocks a few name brands. Toilet tissue? You get Safeway. Kleenex? You get Safeway tissue.
The asinine thing is that Safeway *already* does not use the frequency marketing card data to datamine it and say to themselves "Hmmmm... this card never buys anything containing peanuts, and hasn't for 10 years; let's flag them so that if they accidentally get something that has peanuts in it, they get an 'are you sure?' at the checkout". This despite the databases they already have on product ingredients and everything the card has *ever* been used to buy make this type of mining *trivial*.
Instead, the assholes print out $0.50 off coupons for exactly the products that we've been avoiding for 10 years, every time we buy an "equivalent" non-store brand version of the item. Of course it's cleverly based on the fact that on our next trip we are likely to be picking up one of the "equivalent" products that don't contain what amounts to rat poison, or might as well, for the allergic person.
Seriously, this is a stupid idea.
That sounds like a much bigger problem with American drivers than with cyclists.
What kind of person feels obligated to harass someone else because they don't agree with the way they choose to get around or live their lives?
How about each individual reduced their emissions by getting more efficient cars (electic car + wind/solar/hydro?) and making minor detour from trips you do anyway.
Why waste efficiency by converting the energy to electricity? If you have a wind powered car you can't help but make minor detours as you zig zag along.
Nice. You're hittin' the "hipster foodie" stereotype out of the park, man!
Yeah, I've got to agree. Cannibalism is the best option.
It actually is fun riding my bike around, even to get groceries. I use panniers and I typically get a weeks worth in that. Maybe I need two trips... and I do it coming home from work, so it's not that big of a deal.
But do you even think about what you're saying with the CO2? As a cyclist, sure, I emit some CO2, but it was from food I ate that probably took CO2 from the atmosphere within the last year - it's a short cycle and when factored over a year, nearly nets out. When I drive, my car is taking CO2 that was taken from the atmosphere millions of years and puts it back in the atmosphere.
And further on efficiency, if your huge fridge is stuffed with a months worth of food, then it's burning a lot more energy to keep it all cold. With a week's worth, one can have a smaller and more efficient fridge.
And inefficient lifestyle? Well, sure I spend a little more time bike-commuting. But I'm healthier for it by far. After a year of this, my blood pressure is down, my cholesterol is down, and my resting pulse rate is about 10 bpm slower. This is way better for me than spending money and extra going to the gym to try and be healthy. Plus, traffic is much less stressful and I'm generally more awake and more energized during the day - and I spend much less time trying to find parking at work since I ride right to my office door.
And you know, I can bike-commute and still keep food stores for emergencies. I'm not too worried about a blizzard... my house has a wood fireplace and I have a couple cases of MREs and a week's worth of dried foods, and several gallons of stored water.
Really, being a cyclist and bike-commuter is not nearly as bleak as you make it out to be.
I've considered this option for myself but I haven't yet invested in the trailer. In your experience, how easy are they to lock up with the bicycle? Biking to the grocery store with my wife but then requiring one of us to wait outside to guard the bikes is workable but not the best. We had the same problem when we walked to the store towing a little red wagon. I ended up pulling it around the store instead of using a grocery cart because there was no good place to leave it outside. (That sounds great except the thing was really noisy on its hard-rubber tires.)
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
I think the best option is to buy a couple of metres of lightweight chain from a hardware store, and a good padlock. You can loop the chain through the bike, the trailer and some structure, then lock it. A thief could break the chain with a bolt cutter, but its next to impossible to protect your stuff against people with tools, anyway.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I live some 20 miles from the supermarket and it is not safe to ride bicycles on these roads. If I want to go to the butcher and actually get meat worth eating, then I have to go 40 miles. Car, freezer. I make a short shopping trip twice a month, a brief one once or twice, and a long one once, or thereabouts, when I'm near the store.
Bike-riding is a bad solution pretty much anywhere in the USA. There's a couple of cities that have bike paths, but they also have inclement weather so you can only realistically do it part of the year.
Bikes are about as good as they will ever get already, at least the non-powered ones. But cars can get a lot more efficient. And being a driver is not as inefficient as you make it out to be.
Horses for courses
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I get most of my food at the farmers market
How's that February local produce working out for you? Or are you talking about a "farmer's market" that has stuff brought in from thousands of miles away? Or is it possible you're talking about a region with a climate that isn't like many other places?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
You're right... I'm lucky that I live in a city that is, at least by American standards, bike-friendly. And the weather in winter is rainy but doesn't often get below freezing. I did my first through-the-winter bike-commuting this year and it was kind of fun, even if it was cold and wet.
But indeed most US cities seem to be made by the cars, and for the cars, and there are some drivers who have an irational rage about cyclists.
I commute to work every day. Why don't eco-people pressure companies into allowing more telecommuting? If my little trip to the grocery store is so damaging to the environment, then I can't imagine what my daily commute is doing.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
Adoption of grocery delivery services is very, very low in most areas (I am familiar with), so if the truck is to leave the store "filled to capacity" it will be covering a very large area, the customers will not be "clustered in neighborhoods" - this will have an impact on the reduction in carbon dioxide achieved.
Where I live (suburbs) it seems that most people stop at the supermarket on their way to/from somewhere else (not a single trip to the market and back), a delivery service may eliminate the stop, but it won't eliminate the car trip, a trip that will likely involve driving past the market on the way to the dry cleaner, book store, office/work, etc.
Ken
They build the supermarkets near major arteries because that's where the people are...
Ken
So they researched and proved that a delivery route (single vehicle, multiple stops) is more efficient than the least efficient use of a car (a large number of single occupant, single stop "trips") - seriously? That was a "riddle" they needed to solve?
What's next - are fully-utilized light-rail systems more fuel efficient than commuters driving themselves to work in their own cars?
This qualifies as research?
Ken
I live within walking distance to three grocery stores. I'll keep using my own two feet, thank you very much. 100% reduction over even the truck delivery method. There's still have greenhouse emissions getting the food to the store, but that's unavoidable.
Some people like fresh food, not canned crap.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
If by prissy dumbass you mean fit and athletic looking -- versus overweight and sluggish -- I'll take the bike with the trailer.
I've seen cool bike trailers.
And the bike need not have streamers fluttering from the handlebars !
What kind of person feels obligated to harass someone else because they don't agree with the way they choose to get around or live their lives?
A cyclist. Seriously.
And I say this as someone who spends his share of time pedaling on two wheels as well. Cyclists are at least as bad as motorists, at least here in NJ. Taking up a whole lane going 20mph on a 45mph road when doing so in a motor vehicle would get you a ticket for obstructing traffic. Completely ignoring traffic signals when convenient. Flipping off motorists for *gasp* driving cars on roads.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
I can share the road with a human-powered vehicle (that's easier on the rare occasion a cyclist deigns to obey traffic signals), but to be sneered at because I choose not to triple my commute time just irritates me.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Let me introduce you to the price tag. Those things look to be about $1700-$2300!
It's easy being 'green' when you have a lot of green.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
It baffles me how many people make special trips for things, i never go just one place, if i need one thing it can wait until i have more places to go. Go to the grocery store 2-3 times a week, theres 3 on the way home from work. We do big grocery shopping for staples and nonperishables at one further away probably every other weekend, but we also go to target, the hardware store and sams club on those trips.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
You got some issues with "hipsters", that's for sure.
If you buy bottled water on a weekly basis, YOU ARE AN ASSHOLE.
Are bike trailers and bicycles free? Do you have unlimited time in Eurotrash land, as well?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Single, huh?
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
That's right, comrade. Come the Revolution, the proles will get what we on the Central Committee decide they get.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
One tenth of a car. And the running costs are far lower.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
There is no way a bike could carry one week worth of groceries for a family
The Dutch have cargo bikes called bakfiets.
This has been known for some time. The biggest energy cost associated with many food products is moving the 2-ton family SUV to and from the grocery store to move 25 pounds of merchandise. Moving a fully loaded semi isn't that expensive per unit weight.
Webvan is coming back. Amazon owns it now. Webvan was popular, but the operating costs were too high. One of Webvan's executives realized that what they needed was robots. He went on to found Kiva Systems, which makes robots for warehouse operations. Kiva robots handle fulfillment at Walgreens.com, Gap.com, Staples.com, and many other big retailers.
Amazon recently bought Kiva. Amazon's CEO is an investor in Rethink Robotics, which makes robot arms and hands. (The Kiva robots move shelf units to human pickers, where a laser pointer shows them what to pick. It looks like eliminating the human pickers is next.) Amazon is opening local warehouses in major cities. Amazon is starting to offer same-day delivery. This time it will be profitable.
Small retailers who are aware of this are very afraid.
Damn right she does, do you know how hard it is to simply order a PBR at a bar without feeling ironic these days? They ruin *EVERYTHING*
+1 Disagree
Free? No. They cost about two months worth of gasoline...
+1 Disagree
I tip my hat to you, good sir.
+1 Disagree
A lightweight bike lock is cheap and easy to use. Tie the bikes together or tie them together to a sign or bike rack or whatever is there, looping it through the trailer wheel. Odds are quite long that in the thirty minutes you're shopping somebody will notice your bikes, defeat your lock, and make off with them.
+1 Disagree
I keep hearing about farmer's markets being better than supermarkets, and it simply isn't true.
Is your "supermarket" some low-end discount place that caters exclusively to the poor? There is one place that that near me. I never shop there. There are indications: They don't offer bags or they charge you for them, and they won't help you out to your car. Cans are dented. They sell junk food and soul food, but not a full selection of fruits and vegatables. The store has signs that offer to send money to other countries. Uh, to mention an awkward issue, the shoppers are more likely to be obese and black.
The place I go to will always ask if I want paper or plastic, and always ask if I want help getting my stuff to the car. The place I shop at offers minimally processed meat. They sell USA-grown rabbit. They sell tomatos on the vine. They sell bags of super-ripe indoor-grown tomatos. They stock goose, star fruit, at least a half dozen kind of pears including Asian pears, shiitake mushrooms, a full selection of organic stuff, etc. You can get non-rotting fresh fish, or you can get minimally-processed (no phosphates or carbon monoxide or colorings) frozen fish. You can get live lobsters and shellfish. You can get European-style Mars bars, both Marmite and Vegemite, german pasta (spaetzle), german bread (rye), and French jam/jelly. You can get tortillas with just 5 ingredients, all simple and natural, or you can get ones loaded with omega-3 fatty acids and fiber.
The differences are like night and day. If your supermarket sucks, find a better one. Look for a wealthy suburban zip code and go there.
Also lottery tickets and tobacco. In much of the US, mom&pop corner stores have been replaced by 7-11 or similar chains, but the functions are still similar. Ethnic neighborhoods are more likely to have mom&pop stores with a bit more specialized food varieties, but they're still selling the high-profit-margin goods that keep them in business.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Good bread can last just fine if you treat it well (and don't eat it all, of course.) Refrigeration keeps it from going moldy, plastic bags keep it from drying out in the fridge. And here in the San Francisco Bay Area (or up in Seattle), there's lots of choices of good bread, even if you don't like sourdough. (Maybe soft spongey breads don't last as long without preservatives, but I don't eat those.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Just sell the groceries off the trucks, so customers can pick up whatever they want, which ever brand etc. Load some trucks in the morning, and each of them cover like a few block radius, encouraging people to walk. My grandma and mom did this back when in a third world country. First few weeks there would be some miss and hit as far as location and merchandise supply and demand. That is OK. Collect data from this few weeks experience and optimizes it over time.
Woah... Where do you live that people are *that* shitty to each other?
+1 Disagree
1) i generally do not make a separate trip to the store, it is on the way to or from something else (usually work). So the environmental impact of my "shopping trip" is more minimal.
2) $10 for the service is a non-starter. Spending >$50 on groceries is rare for me (I'm single). This amounts to a 20%+ markup. Also, I expect in the US there will be a tip expected eventually.
3) Substitution is also a non-starter. I generally would pick the store brand for stuff where that was acceptable. Where isn't not, i would prefer nothing to the store brand, and reducing the purchase order pushes up the effective markup %. Never wait till your out of TP to buy more.
4) Produce purchases (particularly bananas) are dependent on the quality of the produce - requires inspection to ascertain.
As a cyclist I make it a point to call out others who behave this way. As a driver I make it a point to call out drivers who behave badly around bikes. The good drivers and good cyclists far outnumber the bad ones, but it's the bad ones that keep this animosity going and makes the roads that much more dangerous.
+1 Disagree
When my mother was growing up, the ice man delivered ice for the icebox; they didn't get mechanical refrigeration at home until after the war (and that was in a medium-large city.) If you drank milk, it didn't keep very long, and most people didn't have cars, so delivery made sense.
When I was growing up, milk companies still delivered in the suburbs, and some bakeries delivered, as well as a few more specialized products like potato chips. Most Americans didn't have two cars, and they tended to do large grocery shopping runs on Saturday. My mom learned to drive around 1960 so she could haul us to pre-school, and my dad carpooled to work; they probably got a second car in the late 60s, and they switched over to supermarket milk around 1970, and supermarkets were starting to have enough shelf space by the late 70s to carry more variety of products like potato chips than corner stores could.
If I had had kids, they would have grown up around the time of the internet boom. Webvan and Kozmo briefly delivered a wide variety of convenience foods (and weed :-) and while I never used them, my mother-in-law was elderly and less mobile and found them really useful; they improved her nutritional choices just as AOL improved her ability to socialize (and she'd quit smoking, so she no longer had to go to the store a couple times a week to get cigarettes.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Taking up a whole lane going 20mph on a 45mph road when doing so in a motor vehicle would get you a ticket for obstructing traffic.
But you are aware that safety tips for cyclist specifically recommend to take hold of the complete lane in heavy traffic on narrow roads because otherwise cars will try to overtake with an exessively small distance due to oncoming traffic despite the inherently instable driving mode of the bicycle. Even if 90% of the car drivers behave and wait for a break in the oncoming traffic it's the 10% which don't who eventually kill the cyclist.
BTW, I doubt many cyclist will go 20mph.
Not going to work. If it did then home milk delivery would still be going strong but its not. Now if they could get my order ready at the store for me to pickup well then that might work.
Jack of all trades,master of none
Well, you know... you meet a girl on OKCupid and invite her to dinner. You're running late because you're cycling home from the grocery store and got a flat tire, so you try serving her one of the near-to-expiration MREs (you know, you need to cycle them, first-in, first-out) and the next thing you know, she gets this phone call and it's some kind of emergency... her aunt fell down a well, and she has to leave before she's even eaten. I try to call later to see what's happened but the phone's disconnected. I figure she must have dropped her phone into the well and it got ruined so she canceled the account.
So you know, it's cool... I get to eat two MREs and get both the Tootsie Rolls AND the M&Ms. I just wish someone would cover all those wells these's girls' aunts keep falling into. It's a real safety hazzard out there!
I understand the reasons for taking up a whole lane, and I agree that they are valid.
That being said, what the hell are you doing on a 45mph road if you can't go 45mph? When I go out riding, it is usually on a mountain bike (the roads are in desperate need of resurfacing, and there's plenty of off-road shortcuts). I rarely exceed 20mph, primarily due to relatively low tire pressure, relatively large tire width, lack of gearing options, lack of spandex, and overall relaxed attitude. I am aware of these limitations, so I don't go on roads where I know I would be taking up a whole lane while being unable to maintain speed.
It's just whenever I see a Lance Armstrong with his spandex suit and 2.4lb, $3000 road bike going slower than a Geo Metro with a clogged air intake, taking up an entire lane when there is a perfectly clean car-lane-width shoulder on the side of the road, not even able to sustain 50% of the speed limit but still giving motorists the finger for crossing the double yellow line to pass him, vehicular homicide starts looking very appealing.
Seriously, if you were in a car, you'd be embarrassed to shit, single-handedly creating traffic jams. Cops would be pulling you over, lecturing you about how you're creating an unsafe situation, handing out tickets. But once you ditch the internal combustion engine, you get a free pass. Suddenly the unsafe situation is countered by your commitment to being carbon-neutral? The traffic jams are not worth mentioning because you're helping fight the obesity epidemic? It's absurd, and it doesn't look like it's going to stop until motorists finally snap and flatten us all.
Chuuch. Preach. Tabernacle.
It's the "looping it through" that's the problem. I currently use a U-lock which is somewhat restrictive in terms of what I can attach the bike to. That's if there's even something suitable nearby. I think somebody would look askance if I locked my bike up to the sign that says "No Parking, Fire Lane"
Virtue finds and chooses the mean.
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea
That's why I stopped using my u-lock. Tough to crack, but also tough to use. If you have two bikes or a bike and a trailer, just lock them together. Hard to walk off with two of them. The point is to make it non-trivial to steal. If somebody can't just hop on and ride away, the odds of it getting stolen drops.
+1 Disagree
The asinine thing is that Safeway *already* does not use the frequency marketing card data to datamine it and say to themselves "Hmmmm... this card never buys anything containing peanuts, and hasn't for 10 years; let's flag them so that if they accidentally get something that has peanuts in it, they get an 'are you sure?' at the checkout".
They don't do it because if people came to rely on the system and an item wasn't marked as having peanuts, or their datamining algorithm didn't detect that you never buy peanut products, or the system broke in some way, or the cashier didn't notice the warning...and someone died, they'd be liable.
Seriously, if you're allergic to peanuts, you can damn well check labels and/or ask.
Please help metamoderate.
We get our groceries delivered by a small company, mainly local (mostly organic) and it's fantastic. Good quality, and they are very friendly and personable. Despite the extra cost we spend less due to not going to the supermarket and getting sucked into buying what we don't need. I don't know about greener though, they send it by courier.
I can share the road with a human-powered vehicle (that's easier on the rare occasion a cyclist deigns to obey traffic signals)
Same here.
I dont mind sharing the road with other road users, even cyclists... I just wish they'd do the same.
Cyclists in Australia are so extremely militant about excising their "right" to ride on the road that they forget about anyone else's right to use the same road. The refuse to use bike paths or bike lanes that were installed expressly so they didn't interfere with traffic (or bypass it altogether) but they become very, very quite whenever someone mentions old Regulation 219 which I see cyclist in violation of at least once a day.
Cyclists are so busy exercising their "rights", they never stop to think if they are actually in the right.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I doubt a delivery truck would cut down on my carbon emitions. I have to drive to work and home (no public transit is available) and there is a grocery store on my route home, so I stop every day or 2 to pick up what is needed. In essence, the only CO2 emitions are from when I start my car when I'm ready to go home, which should be less than what any delivery truck could emit while either starting in my yard, or idling while unloading, not to mention I have a LONG driveway, which would offset any savings if the truck could either start again or idle with higher efficiency than my relatively new car. I do have a lot of my purchases delivered, but it's all to my office, which sees delivery trucks from most courrier services daily, so truck is usually making a special trip to deliver one box to me. Definatly in urban areas, deliverys could be more efficient due to proximity of houses, and I suppose in rural settings it can help too, but in both settings, the biggest savings would be if people were more careful with scheduling their shopping and errands. I know people who will drive to town (20 minute drive) to pick up 3 things at the store, and other people that zig-zag back and forth around town to go to 100 places, when they could save time and gas by planning their trip first.
I don't see milk trucks delivering any more. And I buy groceries on the way home from work.