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E-Commerce Is Clogging City Streets With Delivery Trucks (citylab.com)
The Atlantic's CityLab describes "a massive surge in deliveries to residential dwellings...creating a traffic nightmare." An anonymous reader quotes their report:
While truck traffic currently represents about 7% of urban traffic in American cities, it bears a disproportionate congestion cost of $28 billion, or about 17% of the total U.S. congestion costs, in wasted hours and gas. Cities, struggling to keep up with the deluge of delivery drivers, are seeing their curb space and streets overtaken by double-parked vehicles, to say nothing of the bonus pollution and roadwear produced thanks to a surfeit of Amazon Prime orders... Often, the box trucks will double-park in a two-lane street if there's no loading zone to pull into, snarling traffic behind them... "The streets were not designed for that kind of activity," says Alison Conway, an assistant professor of civil engineering at the City College of New York.
Scott Kubly, director of the Seattle Department of Transportation, says "With the volume of deliveries, ticketing isn't effective for us in terms of managing the street. UPS and FedEx will just negotiate a lump sum payment for all the tickets they get instead of fighting every ticket"... In 2011 in Washington, D.C., UPS alone received just shy of 32,000 tickets. Instead of adjudicating each ticket, many large cities will strike agreements or introduce programs through which delivery companies can pay off all tickets in one swoop.
The article points out online retails sales have grown 15% every year this decade in the U.S. -- calling it the other side of the "retail apocalypse" that's killing brick-and-mortar stores.
Scott Kubly, director of the Seattle Department of Transportation, says "With the volume of deliveries, ticketing isn't effective for us in terms of managing the street. UPS and FedEx will just negotiate a lump sum payment for all the tickets they get instead of fighting every ticket"... In 2011 in Washington, D.C., UPS alone received just shy of 32,000 tickets. Instead of adjudicating each ticket, many large cities will strike agreements or introduce programs through which delivery companies can pay off all tickets in one swoop.
The article points out online retails sales have grown 15% every year this decade in the U.S. -- calling it the other side of the "retail apocalypse" that's killing brick-and-mortar stores.
We need oompa loompas. The trucks are smaller to park and carry multiple workers.
... some sort of public transport service for deliveries?
It beats going to a brick and mortar store where they not only don't carry what you want, but have much higher prices.
Mail order was around long before ecommerce, just remember that.
"Park wherever you want, boys - it's already paid for!"
... Seattle is just upset that tax revenue from failing stores is the real issue. Huge malls need to die. We need to take over main streets for teal stores and service businesses.
Rather than pay traffic fines they work with the USPS more to do last-mile deliveries in every state. USPS already has the infrastructure to do it, they just need more employees again, which the additional revenue from deals with the carriers would give them. Amazon already does this, using UPS for the first part of delivery to a city, then handing off to USPS for finishing the shipping to your house, at least in my area.
Cities just need to convince carriers its to their benefit to increase these arrangements.
The obvious answer is to restrict all the private vehicles carrying only one person. They are the main cause of congestion.
Don't you dare use the United States Postal Service for deliveries! I mean can you imagine the possible efficiency of only one centralized public service, the humanity.
We obviously have to use five or more different delivery drivers carrying one package each.
Who cares about such trivialities as the "World Postal Union" ?
As a cheap-skate, before the age of reliable internet shopping, sometimes I'd go to a shop 5 times before any significant purchase.
Now, most of that browsing is done online. plenty of folks still go for the 'mall experience', but I'd say that for every truck winding down the alleys, you're avoiding a much larger number of folks routing to a set of shops, then back.
In terms of road damage, the single truck likely does slightly more wear over time (more weight at once, worse than many smaller weights), but in terms of congestion, the truck is going to be spending much less overall time on the main roads every day, than the shoppers would.
But really, are we actually going back to "is the internet bad for our shared resources" discussions?
Far too late to put that genie back in the bottle - it's granting too many important wishes to go back now.
Ryan Fenton
The delivery truck makes many stops per route. An individual shopper makes just one stop and needs a parking space.
So, what's the cost of wasting an entire day, visiting several stores, to not find what you're looking for?
It's a common occurrence over there, and evidently the residents have learned to deal with such obstacles on two-lane roads.
It's far more efficient to have a single loaded truck provided multiple deliveries at once to an entire apartment/building complex. But for the suburbs, drone delivery might be more efficient if a single truck made the finally drop-off with drones. Sort of like a mobile drone carrier where you might have two or more simultaneous drone launches, drop off, then fly back to the truck where a recharge occurs automatically while docked inside.
Life is not for the lazy.
Just like how road infrastructure have changed from horse and buggy to automobiles, we need fresh ideas on road infrastructure planning. Roads should be accommodating to the users and not the other way around. Wasn't one of the major campaign issue, for both US political parties during the election, was to improve infrastructure.
When retail stores were in downtown areas, there was tremendous congestion when people went to shop.
When they moved around to different malls, there was still a lot of congestion around the strip centers and malls (as recently as the 90s, I remember waiting thru 15-20 minutes of traffic to get into the parking lot.
Now, I bought and paid for 5 products on amazon- I didn't drive- I didn't consume gas- I didn't contribute to congestion on the roads- I didn't get into a car accident, and my car wasn't damaged in the parking lot.
Say 20 consumers shopping personally consume 400 minutes of road time-- 20 shoppers delivery shopping consume 40 minutes of road time.
The problem is the parking infrastructure will need to adapt.
There was a time when we had a mail box at every house. Now, a lot of places have 1 mail box.
Perhaps we'll end up with a big centralized delivery hub for each block. Perhaps a designated parking area for delivery vehicles.
Amazon is looking into drones.
In any case, it's not a problem in my neighborhood yet. They pull up, drop off stuff. The road is constricted but not blockded at any time. Then they leave within 2-3 minutes. This may be more of a problem for high rise condos or apartment buildings than residential neighborhoods.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You know, in ancient Rome and even outlying territories, they had worked out that commercial deliveries had to be restricted to certain hours to make things manageable. You would think we would um, take advantage of proven techniques like that?
There are multiple reasons why roads should be privatized, and this is merely one of them. If a truck causes more congestion than a car, a private road would likely charge more for a truck, internalizing the cost of infrastructure for delivery.
"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session." -- Judge Gideon J. Tucker
Solution: super-long-range package catapults.
That made sense, a local hub to pick up packages rather than 100,000 trucks circling around every day just leaving things on the porch to get stolen anyhow.
amirite?
"The streets were not designed for that kind of activity," says Alison Conway, an assistant professor of civil engineering at the City College of New York.
You're trying to tell me that things would be better if those customers were driving their own cars on the same streets to shop at traditional retail stores?
Suppose you were an idiot. Now, suppose you were a traffic engineer. But I repeat myself.
Does it really create more traffic to have delivery trucks driving around delivering to multiple people vs each of those people driving around their own vehicle to go to the store?
Packages are delivered to the Amazon Locker at the 7-11 down the street or to my post office box. Anything delivered to my apartment will walk off before I get home.
Not any more. It pays to shop. Amazon has been raising prices to the point of charging the same as local - or more (including book!) - and charging sales AND shipping.
Sometimes there's deal online, and other times not. And remeber, stores CSI order for you at NO extra charge,
And if they have it in stock, FREE instantaneous shipping. Even if Bezos invents a transporter, he still can't beat that.
And as brick and mortar stores are continually killed off, expect to be charged even more online - "convenience" charges anyone?
Seattle is where both Amazon and UPS were founded. What is he complaining about?
Thankfully, places that sell shit know that, and have parking spaces.
or, more appropriately, "anthill". Too many people cramped together in too little space cause traffic jams. Either live with it or move to a less populated area.
There's a flip side to that calculation, though.
If you drive to the mall, you may buy in half a dozen shops, and you'll take all the purchases home with you. If you shop online, that's *at least* half a dozen different deliveries - very likely more, if your purchases don't all get batched together for some reason.
The economies of scale in delivery - depend on scale. If a particular shop only manages to make one sale to someone on your street in a given day, then there's not a lot of "economy of scale" to be had. So the net effect on traffic is not guaranteed to be positive.
and today even get their groceries delivered to them at their door because they don't want to bag and carry them home, I'm literally just waiting for the news of American homes with piping supplying puréed food, where you can just pull a string and have food squirted down your throat while you're laying in bed.
Talk about one of the easier traffic/city problems to resolve...
https://martinfowler.com/bliki/InversionOfControl.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... Chicago Tunnel Company
If a particular shop only manages to make one sale to someone on your street in a given day,
But there are deliveries being made every day to practically every house on the street. By the US Post Office. And there is a community mailbox just across the street from me with a couple of big parcel bins.
I've had a number of on-line sellers use parcel post and it seems neither more expensive nor slower than UPS or FedEx.
Have gnu, will travel.
Why are these trucks double-parked and blocking traffic? Why aren't the police enforcing the traffic laws?
That would both encourage more efficient delivery methods and take up some of the time they spend locking up kids for having a joint in their pocket, so it sounds like win-win.
Who's getting paid?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
There will be a single payer system that will deliver to everyone. They'll call it something clever, like "United States Postal Service." They'll organize delivery areas and rationalize it so that only one delivery person needs visit every street every day. No congestion. Predictable delivery.
Seriously, this seems to have become a "problem" with the Amazon doing it's own deliveries. I see more generic white vans with Amazon logos than I do Fedex or UPS trucks.
What I don't get is why it wouldn't make more sense for Amazon to partner with USPS to handle last-mile delivery. They could pre-sort by zip and deliver in bulk to individual post offices once a day and let USPS deliver it.
I suppose Amazon is Uber-izing package delivery, and making it a race to the bottom job.
The drivers of these vehicles and the companies they work for don't mind the tickets because it's just a cost, and the cost of the tickets is lower than what it would cost them if they couldn't offer such fast delivery.
If FedEx, for example, doesn't do it but UPS does, UPS has a competitive advantage, which forces FedEx to do it too. Then to complicate matters, retailers like Amazon's traffic snarls roadways, making going to their competition, a local brick and mortar store, even more of a pain in the ass, damaging THOSE businesses, leading to decline in sales and a corresponding decline in municipal tax revenues, which lead in turn to not being able to expand already overburdened streets, or repair them as much leading to a decline in quality of the roadway and fewer people driving to stores... and the cycle continues.
Over time, the cities with lots of e-commerce customers will see an eroding of their towns, higher unemployment, diminishing property values, crumbling public works and infrastructure, as Bezos and others like him, and those rich enough to own a lot of their stock, suck, leech-like, on the blood of the American people, and bit by bit, more and more wealth accretes in the hands of the billionaire class, for whom too much money is never even enough money.
Bezos and his kind through this over years have been quietly doing this because to them, even having almost all the money and all the property isn't sufficient... to be truly happy, they have to know that everyone else is in crushing abject poverty.
Oh, and when you buy stuff from them, the time and money YOU save will add to the expense of all your friends' and neighbors' cost of living in the form of spending more on gas, and having to wade through the traffic you added to when you made a giant van stop for several minutes in front of your house to drop off a box that could be carried in a bicycle basket.
As for the aforementioned cost increase, FedEx, UPS et.al. don't pay that... they just pass it through from the retailer/shipper in the form of higher transportation costs they must pay, which THEY then turn around and pass right onto YOU, in the form of higher prices
Also, each time each dollar is passed from one person or company to another, that hand-changing ALSO costs money and of course you pay that too! It costs a little money to make that happen, so that cost's passed along with the cost
Yes, this is stupid bullshit.
One delivery truck with 50 orders on it is ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE better for the environment than 50 people getting into 50 cars and schlepping themselves to 50 different stores, and back.
One delivery truck takes 50 car trips out of the traffic equation. "Clogging city streets" my hairy ass.
E-commerce is not new. If box delivery trucks are having to double-park on streets, then the cities are clearly not adapting to the rise of e-commerce as they should be.
Also, the government is prohibited by the Constitution, incorporated to the States, from interfering with the execution of private contracts. Failing to adapt to the ride of e-commerce may very well constitute an unconstitutional abridgment by government on the execution of these contracts. It is government's JOB to provide for the general welfare of the United States, and that means being an enabler, not a hindrance, to commerce of all types.
not delivering during business hours?
You know, most people have things called "jobs" (it's why they're called "business hours"), so they're not home then anyway.
I would personally love to have expensive packages delivered when I'm home, and have the driver actually wait for me to get to the door to take them.
I think there should be an incentive to consolidate into a single box, thus eliminating traffic. I've had 4 different boxes from 4 different carriers with 4 items in a single day from a single order from Amazon. (UPS, USPS, FedEx, and Lasership) I realize they are trying to get things to my house as fast as possible, but I usually select 4-5 day shipping to give them a chance to consolidate.
As the post says. The failure is that they don't hurt the delivery people enough.
"delivery truck cause congestion/pollution" Post the "Why we need to tax online services even more at the state and local level" follow up.
Dear local governments: Go fuck yourselves. I don't care if you are losing all your tax base on all those costly shop mall projects that you were dumb enough to make tax free up until last week and now they are all going out of business just when you were supposed to get a return on your "investment".
Now the size of that defunct local mall retail giant and open 24/7 to boot. Stuff all that traffic there then even have massive parking lots for all the trucks and people picking up.
Bonus, building not vacant anymore.
Everyone who, over the past year or two, has balked, laughed at, or ignored at the thought of drone-based package delivery can now stare blankly into the inevitable future. Ecommerce companies saw this coming. The first one there will absolutely crush their competition.
Uh...so does the truck. That's sort of the issue here--trucks blocking the street while delivering packages.
In many cities not only are the streets not designed but everything about the city seems as if no intelligence at all was every applied to designing much of anything. What we really see in cities is an elderly quagmire to which additions upon additions are heaped into the web creating an ever worse situation. Whether it is a tiny box of candy or a huge new sofa it is overwhelmingly obvious that one would need space for deliveries to be accommodated even when a horse drawn wagon arrived with that sofa. The sins of local planners will be visited upon their children even for ten or more generations. So for apartment houses let drones deliver to the roofs or courtyards and for homes let a flag pole like platform be built that has a feature for lowering the received package down to ground level. But really, the major answer is to destruct our older cities, lay out new plans and start over. Just imagine how many new jobs we could create if we leveled Brooklyn and redesigned and rebuilt from the ground up, and how much more sane the place could be. Then there is Chicago or Baltimore or any number of places just begging to be plowed down and redone.
The delivery vans and trucks will be on routes, stop only where they need to deliver (or a central point for multiple deliveries).
Unlike the random hopping of consumers all fighting for premium parking while scraping for the Best Deal they can, burning parking money and fuel, which eats into their budget for spending...
Seems like an interesting trade-off to me...
My five purchases were bundled into 2 shipments.
Perhaps you have a point for these new "2 hour delivery" but that's kinda like domino's "30 minutes or less" deal.
For daily deliveries, it just makes sense to bundle them.
The straw that broke this particular camel's back was when I went shopping- spent 3 hours of time, put over 30 miles on my car, came back home without the product- and then bought it on line in 20 minutes and it was at my house 2-3 days later.
---
There is a problem tho-- when I shopped locally, the money circulated in the local economy 7 times. When I shop online- it's being pumped directly out of my local economy. Where there were 5 or more clerks- now there is one delivery employee. And when you bring in the other 19 shoppers- it's more like 100 retail clerks to one delivery employee.
Automation, robotics, and efficiency measures are destroying jobs much faster than they are being created.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Duh.
So, E-Commerce adds one stop to the UPS guy's route.
A little more engine idling, ZERO extra miles.
A shopping trip is at least 5 miles round trip, often 10 miles or more.
As someone who used to move office furniture for a living, i learned first-hand that many highrise buildings do not have adequate facilities for trucks. There dont seem to be any standard requirements for truck facilities & some architects seem to have forgotten that buildings are useless if you cant get furniture/mail/packages in & out of them.
The cities that are having problems with this need to write up some standards for large buildings' truck access. Much like the requirements we have for handicapped access. Loading bays aren't shiny, they don't look nice in the real estate brochures, a lot of times they smell bad so they tend to get forgotten, but the are absolutely vital.
You can tell which buildings don't have proper truck facilities, they'll be the ones that constantly have big trucks blocking the road in front of them.
pneumatic tube delivery system again I guess..
I highly doubt that delivery vehicles are nearly as much of a hassle as they suggest. In fact I would assume that they are hassle neutral if not a positive, decreasing personal vehicle traffic significantly. Imagine a fully loaded UPS truck makes 100 deliveries a day, that is up to 100 fewer cars buzzing around a day to purchase the same items.
The Trump Presidency, OTOH....
Yamato 2nd largest home delivery very short handed and just got dinged for over working staff ( MGMt will take a temp symbolic pay cut for this year ), rates also going up soon too. As for traffic Yamato and Sagawa usually have small distribution offices where deliveries can be made by bike or with a cart or even foot rolling the big cage though usually a mid size almost rick Shaw design just for packages. Wonder why the deliveries are not more automated to let customer via smart phone confirm if home/delivery time. Amazon does send progress messages so aware of approximate arrival but if not home not aware of way to pre-alert delivery service, instead get a note with delivery # that indicates attempted to deliver then can schedule next drop off but needs to be a time window with a couple hours range for flexibility. I check prices on kakaku. Com as do many folks. On line shopping for some things easier then treking to a store. For fresh fruits and veggies for me easier to walk to local grocer and pick out. Tokyo claming down on deliveries to parks for pizza , beverages.
When someone looks at just one side of the picture. If the delivery services weren't delivering the packages and people were going to brick and mortars themselves to get the products, what would parking look like?