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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.
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.
The USPS is the most worthless delivery service in the world. When someone tries to send me a package by USPS it has maybe a 50/50 chance of getting to me. They'll deliver "signature required" items without a signature, they'll happily fold "DO NOT BEND" packages in half, they're more than happy to impale boxes with a forklift and refuse to cover the damage.
Things bought from Amazon Prime arrive on time, every time. The last order I had from Amazon Prime had a single item that was sent by the USPS, because it wasn't sold by Amazon but by a third party. It was days late. Everything else was either on time or early.
There's a reason people don't use the USPS.
Don't you dare use the United States Postal Service for deliveries!
The USPS is exorbitantly expensive for any sort of guaranteed delivery. It is also overpriced for packages over a pound. They have weird pricing, like "media mail" where the postage varies, not just by weight and destination, but by the content of the package. So it may be cheap to mail a book, but expensive to mail a t-shirt.
I mean can you imagine the possible efficiency of only one centralized public service
That sounds great in theory, but so does Marxism. Centralization very very rarely beats a competitive market for efficiency.
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?
That sounds great in theory, but so does Marxism. Centralization very very rarely beats a competitive market for efficiency.
Marxism has sounded terrible in theory ever since Game Theory and Information Theory became serious subjects (what, about 50+ years now?)
Same for central planning of anything - it's an information theoretical problem - the central planners always lack sufficient information and sufficient information processing capacity to make good decisions. The information and capacity are distributed in markets.
It's kinda like getting rid of packet-switched networks and having one computer do all of the Internet traffic flow. That would be an unmitigated disaster. Let's name it after Chavez, tho.
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This sounds like all the people that bitch about windows that never use it and how slow Intel m3 cpus are again because they never use them and don't have a clue...
I'd rather get anything by USPS and UPS or FEDEX.. comes at a predictable time and generally twice as fast for their basic service and cheaper to boot... (First Class vs Ground)..
Everyone just loves to bash the post office for some reason without any real reason behind it...
Amazon is already fighting this with their locker program.. probably wont be too long before it's cheaper to get it sent to a locker vs directly to the end destination....
Solution: super-long-range package catapults.
"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.
Mm, Amazon. That 2-Day shipping promise that only goes into effect after they get around to locating your item(s) in one of their warehouses....which can take upwards of a week.
I keep reading articles about them roboticising the workforce, and how much faster / efficient / cost-effective it is...but, to my highly subjective human senses, the service seems to be getting worse (and as a Computer Scientist, my interest is piqued how they might be doing that; I jest, of course, I've worked in IT, and I know how bad decisions make the machines run worse).
But the postal service is a Packet-Switched-Network isn't it?
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.
Seattle is where both Amazon and UPS were founded. What is he complaining about?
Private roads are a great way to make over half the country uninhabitable and unreachable as the tolls necessary to make roads profitable in rural areas would be too high to be practical, thus the roads would never get built which then means these areas will never attain the populations to support roads profitably.
Your link is garbage too. Siting a book summary that doesnt lay out any of the author's evidence does not support your claim at all. But hey, maybe the author has it right and every affluent country in the world has it wrong!
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
They have weird pricing, like "media mail" where the postage varies, not just by weight and destination, but by the content of the package.
One time I ordered an electronic part that was quite thin, the shipper sent it between two magazines because media rate was 50% cheaper than first class even though I paid for first class shipping. Needless to say, I didn't buy from that shipper again.
Centralization very very rarely beats a competitive market for efficiency.
USPS consolidated five zip codes into one distribution center, turning four 30,000-sqft facilities into storefront locations. It took five years to remove all the kinks at the existing facility as the combined workload got done with fewer workers.
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.
The free market competition amongst all of the different roads connecting directly to your driveway will ensure that you can always afford to leave your house.
So, what's the cost of wasting an entire day, visiting several stores, to not find what you're looking for?
If you're wasting an entire day going shopping, you're either doing it wrong, or your stores are twenty miles apart from each other.
Most packages I get are sent SmartPost so they end up being delivered via USPS anyways.
Anonymous Cowards generally receive no replies because you're a coward and I'm a bitch
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.
Private roads are a great way to make over half the country uninhabitable and unreachable as the tolls necessary to make roads profitable in rural areas would be too high to be practical, thus the roads would never get built which then means these areas will never attain the populations to support roads profitably.
Your link is garbage too. Siting a book summary that doesnt lay out any of the author's evidence does not support your claim at all. But hey, maybe the author has it right and every affluent country in the world has it wrong!
Did you just dismiss a book on the subject and then offer your own off-the-cuff opinion as fact?
It turns out most of the private rural roads in the US were originally private toll roads. I have a friend who pays $250 a year dues to a road association that maintains (contracts to maintain) the roads in her area. That's 7% of the Town's taxes on the same property and they don't maintain those rural roads.
A bit of history and a bit of awareness of the reality of rural living both contradict your guess. Maybe you should read the book - if only it were available for free at the top of the page the GP linked! /s
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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?
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And if they have it in stock, FREE instantaneous shipping. Even if Bezos invents a transporter, he still can't beat that.
Its only free if you live in the walmart, otherwise, it costs you gas and wear and tear on your vehicle. For the typical American, a trip to Walmart costs them $9 and they are too stupid to realize it (Average of at least 46.2 cents per mile times an average of 10 miles). In most cases, ground shipping is cheaper from almost anywhere in the US to almost anywhere in the US.
It also requires that you spend an hour (give or take) round trip to Walmart and back, plus the aggravation of dealing with walmarts long lines and absolutely shitty customer service). So at minimum wage, you can add another $10 to that cost. On top of that, even if amazon isn't cheaper than walmart for any given item, there is someone out there that is.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
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.
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.
Did you just dismiss a book on the subject and then offer your own off-the-cuff opinion as fact?
Maybe they did, but I can't say I blame them. The book summary provides no evidence for any of the author's claims, and given that the Mises Institute is an ultra-libertarian think tank that also proposes privatizing everything from police to navigable waterways and aquifers, I can't say I'm convinced either. I lean libertarian myself, but I find many of their positions to be extreme.
I have a friend who pays $250 a year dues to a road association that maintains (contracts to maintain) the roads in her area. That's 7% of the Town's taxes on the same property and they don't maintain those rural roads.
Sorry, I'm a bit confused there. I think you're saying that these are dues that she pays voluntarily and not a mandatory fee or tax (say, as in a homeowners association)? Is $250 equal to 7% of the total property taxes that she pays? Is the maintained area a private road, a neighborhood, all the roads in the town, the rural roads outside of the town, or all of the above?
As the post says. The failure is that they don't hurt the delivery people enough.
A truck already costs more than a car due to higher gas consumption, and thus higher total gasoline taxes they pay which are justified as taxes for road maintenance, although in most states, the gas taxes go into the general coffers, not reserved specifically for transportation.
Average of at least 46.2 cents per mile
Note that figure is total cost, not marginal cost. Marginal cost of driving is more like 20 cents per mile.
It also requires that you spend an hour (give or take) round trip to Walmart and back, plus the aggravation of dealing with walmarts long lines and absolutely shitty customer service). So at minimum wage, you can add another $10 to that cost. On top of that, even if amazon isn't cheaper than walmart for any given item, there is someone out there that is.
OTOH delivery services generally require you to have someone wait in the house for hours.
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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.
Interestingly here in the UK Amazon seem to be using their own courier service almost exclusively for prime orders, with the result that they usually arrive with one delivery guy even if they are sent in multiple shipments.
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Marxism is great except for people.
OTOH delivery services generally require you to have someone wait in the house for hours.
Hahahaha, No.
Delivery drivers will release delivery packages in almost any neighborhood as long as there is some way to "hide" the package so it doesn't get snatched. Be it a back door, a porch, or anywhere else they can deliver it. Even in bad neighborhoods a surprisingly small percentage of such deliveries are reported lost or stolen. On any given day less than 2% of residential deliveries are delayed until the following day because no one was home, and the overwhelming majority (95%+) of residential deliveries are driver release (No signature) because the drivers are expected to leave packages unless the signature is required by the shipper (which costs extra). The reason for all this is simple economics. Paying a driver to stand around for 2 minutes collecting a signature is expensive. It is vastly cheaper for the shippers to take the cheaper shipper release option and simply pay out of pocket for any lost or stolen packages than it is to pay for signature verification on every package. The difference in cost is so dramatic that any given shipper would have to be replacing almost 20% of their packages before the cost of signatures would be cheaper than simply replacing merchandise.
If you have been having trouble with getting your packages delivered to your door, I would suggest the following steps: 1) unlock your screen door so that the driver can place packages between your screen door and inside door. This is the easiest "hiding" spot they can use. 2) put a small note just inside the screen door indicating where larger packages can safely be left. 3) Call the carrier and ask to have a note put on your delivery address indicating a safe place to put delivery packages. 4) find a friendly neighbor who is home during the day and leave a note for packages to be delivered there in the event of an issue. There are many more such suggestions but they all boil down to creating an obvious place for the delivery driver to put something for you to find, but is not in plain view from the street.
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted
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...
That would be really good for the environment. What's the downside?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Eh, I tend go hit Walmart on the weekends, grab a sub at subway there and fill up on gas as well (not the best but the one in my town is often good depending on who's running the counter... and at least the southern gals around here recognize ya after awhile and just about remember your order). So, all things considered it is an economical place to go because it saves be from going 3 others places to do the same thing if it didn't exist.
:/
It costs me more like a $1-2 in gas to vist walmart.. lets say $3 if you want to factor in wear and tear and oil changes and I'm being generous. Most people live within 10-20 min of a walmart... $9 to visit Walmart is silly. Although I am leaving a bit out... I hit a deer tonight on the way back from Walmart... I haven't factored that in yet but I expect it will not make the numbers any better
C) How the market for commodity retail goods works. Normal margins are about 3%, similar to Walmart. Do you really think they're going to destroy Walmart any time soon?
Amazon's e-commerce business is a very profitable sideline for them, but they make their money from AWS. They sell much more "stuff" overall, but 90% of Amazon's profits are from AWS.
Anyway, for retails goods which are available for any company to sell, the profit margins are always slightly over the actual sales cost. This is because there is plenty of competition which will undercut on price very quickly if you raise your prices. Amazon has distribution, sales costs and volume advantages over most other companies, so they're able to price lower for most stuff. That doesn't mean they can ever raise their prices to anything higher than their next closest competitor's costs without being undercut in turn. They know that, so they keep their prices lower than the competition in order to keep their customer base.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
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.
You clearly haven't been in a Walmart. ... Otherwise you'd add people of Walmart as another reason not to go. :-)
Same for central planning of anything - it's an information theoretical problem - the central planners always lack sufficient information and sufficient information processing capacity to make good decisions.
You mean like say the military? Given the choice to defend my home, I'll chose a centralised military over and disorganised rabble carrying pitchforks.
I think you need to revise your hypothesis.
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.
I'm in an urban area and the front step is my hidden spot too. Never had an issue, though I do send high priced stuff to my office.
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.
The trick here is the road belongs to the neighborhood, and the neighborhood is free to hire different companies to come in and do the repair and upgrade work. My HOA has private security patrols in addition to city police. We have our own private park in addition to using city parks. We have our own deed restrictions that are more strict than the city's zoning laws (but aren't crazy like some HOAs). We don't own our streets, but if we did we'd just up the HOA fees marginally to cover that.
My parents live in a rural area, 7 miles outside of town in either direction. The larger town is only about 16,000 people. Their immediate road is off of a county road. It's owned by the landowners along the road. They pay different companies for maintenance and improvements by taking bids and selecting contractors. The county road is actually maintained mostly by a full-time county road crew. The towns in either direction, though, mostly have their streets maintained and improved by private road construction contractors. The main difference is the city government takes the bids and awards the contracts. All of that connects to state highways, US highways, Interstate highways, and other county and private roads and then to city streets in other cities, some of which maintain their own roads and some of which contract out the work.
A subdivision or neighborhood owning property cooperatively is nothing new, odd, or unmanageable. Many apartment buildings in fact are owned as condominiums or cooperatives even in places as dense as New York.
USPS consolidated five zip codes into one distribution center, turning four 30,000-sqft facilities into storefront locations. It took five years to remove all the kinks at the existing facility as the combined workload got done with fewer workers.
Yeah but in 5 years how much did mail volume fall?
https://about.usps.com/who-we-...
Those differences are irrelevant. How are mandatory payments to a homeowners' association substantially different from government taxation? (Other than the fact that homeowners' associations are usually *more* oppressive than governments. At least most governments don't care if you have a couple of weeds in your flower bed, and most have some checks and balances.)
At any rate, the OP was proposing that the owner of the private road would charge delivery trucks extra for congestion. This implies micromanagement and detailed tolls, not just contracting out maintenance.
His hypothesis is fine. The military has the exact same problem with not knowing what's going on in far-flung regions and an inability to process the flood of incoming information in a timely manner. There are many recent examples of the military getting it wrong.
If your home were under attack by a neighboring town, you're going to have much better luck getting some locals together to fight than you are waiting for the President to send military troops. Odds are you'd be wiped out long before they ever heard you were in trouble.
The USPS is exorbitantly expensive for any sort of guaranteed delivery. It is also overpriced for packages over a pound. They have weird pricing, like "media mail" where the postage varies, not just by weight and destination, but by the content of the package. So it may be cheap to mail a book, but expensive to mail a t-shirt.
On the other hand, they sometimes handle international deliveries a lot better. USPS's website quoted around $30 to deliver a 5"x5"x6" 10-oz package to a friend in Canada. I hoofed to to the nearby UPS store (because their web site is USELESS if you're not setting up or representing a business), and they told me it would cost $96 to ship this small package worth $50 to British Columbia. Fuuuuuuuck that.
The exact words of the post to which I directly replied were "The free market competition amongst all of the different roads connecting directly to your driveway will ensure that you can always afford to leave your house." which has to do with tolls only in passing. My point is that private roads aren't always tolled. They're not always open for public traffic, either.
Public roads aren't always toll-free, either. Have you ever been on the interstate system around Chicago? Tolls. On tax-supported roads.
Delivery trucks don't cause congestion anyway. If three people in my neighborhood order packages, one truck delivering the three is fewer vehicles on the road than the three of us taking individual cars to individual stores or even to the same post office for pickup. UPS, FedEx, and USPS are like mass transit for goods. They ease congestion.
If the streets are not designed for the vehicles licensed to operate on them, that's a design issue. It's not a usage issue. Put designated package delivery parking zones where they're needed, and the problem of putting the hazard flashers on in the lane of traffic goes away.
Who paid for the road and the signage for that zone is really a different and separate matter. The socialists and libertarians should both take a moment to agree on a solution here before bitching about who grabs the check.
I was originally mocking the private toll system described by the grandparent post's "private road" solution to alleged truck congestion; you can re-read it yourself:
a private road would likely charge more for a truck, internalizing the cost of infrastructure for delivery
Which implies that some corporation is setting toll rates based on profitability decisions. My point was: what could be more profitable than holding people for ransom on their own property?
You popping in to talk about other types of private and/or public systems that might exist is irrelevant.
It's great how you've been modded "Insightful," even though you provided no insight and just regurgitated the classic "but without the government X people would lose out" argument. Look, you can apply that to any argument. Without government producing shoes, poor people wouldn't have shoes! Anyway, let's take this step by step, since not doing so would be hypocritical:
Private roads are a great way to make over half the country uninhabitable and unreachable as the tolls necessary to make roads profitable in rural areas would be too high to be practical, thus the roads would never get built which then means these areas will never attain the populations to support roads profitably.
First off, rural roads are much cheaper to build than urban roads or highways, so there would be a lower barrier to the building of rural roads. Now, how much is someone willing to pay for a road? He's willing to pay as much value that road is worth it to him. If someone isn't willing to pay for the creation of a road to his property, then he thinks the benefit (his use of the road) is less than the cost of the road. The road will not be built if it's not worth it. If it is worth it, measured by willingness to pay, it will be built. Simple as that. Who are you to say that the government should take the money of others to finance the building of roads to serve people who don't even value the road enough to pay for it themselves? Yes, this creates pressure to move to more densely-packed areas, but aren't those more environmentally friendly anyway?
[C]iting a book summary that doesn[']t lay out any of the author's evidence does not support your claim at all.
I was hoping that anyone interested enough would take the time to read the book. Otherwise, you're not looking to learn something, only to stir the waters on the internet and proclaim your unsupported opinion to the world. I wasn't linking to the summary. I was linking to the book. If you can't handle that one, how about something shorter. Maybe a chapter of a different book may be more accessible to you.
But hey, maybe the author has it right and every affluent country in the world has it wrong!
You would probably agree that monarchy wasn't a good thing, but every affluent country in the world had it (or something like it) at one point. Who are you to question monarchy? Or more simply: try to avoid the appeal to popularity.
"No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session." -- Judge Gideon J. Tucker
The military makes a lot of mistakes, but the US Armed Forces are extremely effective, far more so than a decentralized militia. If a neighboring town sent regular troops to attack your home, getting locals together to fight will mostly get them killed or driven off.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Public toll roads often already do charge more for trucks or charge per axle.
Private roads needn't be toll roads. Toll roads needn't be private roads. Charging differently per vehicle type already happens.
Another congestion-relieving measure is high occupancy vehicle lanes, which differentiate again. In fact, in some places (like Houston), you can drive in certain HOV lanes as a single occupant if you pay a toll (or conversely use the toll lanes for free in a HOV during prime commuting hours).
Certain cities do already charge congestion fees to vehicles entering certain areas. Those charges often vary by vehicle type. This includes public roadways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is but one example.
So no, me "popping in" to point out that the posts in the thread are comingling and conflating issues is not at all irrelevant.
Your ad absurdum argument that private roads or toll roads means the street in front of your house will be profit gouging you into a prison lot is not a very strong point.
Sorry, this branch of the thread was *specifically* about one system evangelized by the original poster: private toll roads in front of peoples' houses. The only person comingling and conflating is you, and it's still irrelevant.
We've always been at war with East Asia. Got it.