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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.
"Park wherever you want, boys - it's already paid for!"
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.
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.
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.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
But the postal service is a Packet-Switched-Network isn't it?
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.
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.
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.
most larger online retailers do do that already. it's the priority overnight and same day delivery in larger cities that's causing the problems. if people weren't addicted to "gotta have it now", streets would be just fine.
and as far as " ticketing isn't effective" -- TOW, don't ticket. the delivery companies will train their drivers to park legally pretty damn quick. yes, i realize that just adds yet another truck to the street -- but the ends in this case justify the means. $500-1000+ in fees (towing and storage of a truck isn't cheap) per incident plus salary and travel for an executive to pay the fees, produce ownership, registration and insurance documentation (that isn't what is in the impounded vehicle.. cuz impounded, can't access), and pick up the vehicle; plus a day or two or more delay in delivering the contents of the trucks and all the refunds to shippers for failing to meet delivery standard guarantees... oh boy, they'd learn their lesson fast.
I know it suits some, but man...I'd not like to live that crowded.
I like not having a problem getting things delivered to me.
To each his own I guess.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Most packages I get are sent SmartPost so they end up being delivered via USPS anyways.
Anonymous Cowards generally receive no replies because you're a coward and I'm a bitch
If a particular shop only manages to make one sale to someone on your street in a given day,
But there are deliveries being made every day to practically every house on the street. By the US Post Office. And there is a community mailbox just across the street from me with a couple of big parcel bins.
I've had a number of on-line sellers use parcel post and it seems neither more expensive nor slower than UPS or FedEx.
Have gnu, will travel.
Why are these trucks double-parked and blocking traffic? Why aren't the police enforcing the traffic laws?
That would both encourage more efficient delivery methods and take up some of the time they spend locking up kids for having a joint in their pocket, so it sounds like win-win.
Who's getting paid?
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
> Huge malls need to die.
Here in Atlanta, the nearby enclosed mall *did* die. It's now warehouses and a film studio. However the large regional "inverted" shopping center (parking in the middle, stores on the perimeter) is doing well. This reflects the change in people's shopping habits. Rather than spending a day wandering an enclosed mall, lugging stuff from store to store, people would rather drive right to the stores they want to visit, load stuff in their car, then move to the next. Less carrying, and faster.
This is all part of the same trend that online shopping and the success of of super-centers reflects. People don't have as much time to shop, so they want to do it faster and more conveniently.
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
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?
"These exist already. Every home and building is connected. It's just that there is this weird reluctance to use them. They are called Sewers and Storm Drains. "
Because we really want my wife's monthly protein bar delivery to come leaping out of the toilet.
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.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Though that lesson may be that some areas are simply not practical to deliver too.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
We could even, if there were sufficient volume, consolidate and deliver the packages at a cheap price... we could call these locations "Post Offices."
Because we really want my wife's monthly protein bar delivery to come leaping out of the toilet.
There's so much comedic potential there, I haven't a clue where the fuck to even begin...
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
Fedex hands off to Canada Post where I live as well. What I've taken to doing is to put my physical address on line 1 and my PO Box on line 2, just for this sort of situation. Keeps Fedex happy, since they claim they can't deliver to PO Boxes, even though they hand off to Canada Post, and allows Canada Post to have a box number to ship it to.
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.
And here in South Florida, our malls are generally doing quite well. There are several reasons why:
* The weather sucks outside. Our seasons are Summer, Sauna, Raintorrent, and January. Open-air "lifestyle centers" might do well in California (where it's moderately warm and relatively dry most of the time), but they aren't nearly as appealing in Florida. Sure, high school students on dates might still prefer lifestyle centers on Friday night, but on a hot, steamy, thunderstorm-soaked Saturday afternoon, people who are actually going to shop & spend money want an indoor mall with air conditioning. And when it's raining, a garage (so they can get inside without getting soaked).
* There isn't much true greenfield LEFT in South Florida for sprawling new malls. As of today, there's basically one significant greenfield site suitable for a regional mall remaining in the entirety of urban Dade & Broward County (by I-75 at the Turnpike Extension, which is kind of a weird donut hole surrounded by wall-to-wall development on 3 sides, and limestone mines on the fourth).
* Cities will concede almost ANYTHING to developers to protect their sales-tax cash cow from newer, bigger malls in some nearby municipality... especially if that municipality is on the other side of the county line. I have no doubt that the cities of Sunrise & Pembroke Pines, plus Broward County, will grant just about any request made by the owners of Sawgrass Mills and Pembroke Lakes Mall in the name of protecting their sales tax revenue from American Dream Mall (a few hundred feet on the wrong side of the county line).
* The developers of the last real wave of "big, new regional malls in previously-undeveloped greenfields" in the 80s and 90s were smart enough to leave themselves plenty of room to radically grow in the future (mostly, by replacing their original sprawling parking lots with multi-story garages and new wings).
* There's a certain point where a mall can actually become TOO BIG to be appealing to anyone besides tourists. Malls like Galleria (Fort Lauderdale) and Dadeland (Miami) do well because they have lots of wealthy people living nearby and are relatively convenient to shop at. Malls like International Mall (Doral), Pembroke Lakes Mall (Pembroke Pines), and Broward Mall (Plantation) fall into the niche of "big enough to have what you want, but small enough to be reasonably efficient to shop at if you already know what you want & just need to get to the store and buy it. In contrast, I *might* go to Aventura or Sawgrass Mills once or twice a year, because it's normally just too much of a time-consuming pain in the ass to shop at those two malls (in fact, the last time I went to either mall was SPECIFICALLY because I wanted some game at Gamestop that was only in stock at those two malls).
Interestingly for all the downsides the actual lifestyle doesn't exclude any of those.
- No land or yard of my own is a major benefit. The local park is kept meticulous by the council and is much bigger than the yard in my house in suburbia (currently rented out while I live in the city).
- Sharing walls with neighbours isn't an issue. The only sound that ever comes through is when someone needs to core drill the wall. I've heard that once in the past year. I had more problems in the suburb with noisy neighbours having backyard parties.
- I have friends over for a BBQ all the time. Actually when the sun is out the park is full of people cooking up huge feasts for their friends and families, and when it's cold miserable and raining, well the BBQ turns into an oven roast and they all still come over.
But there's one big on topic thing here:
The only time I ever had problems with deliveries was in suburbia. Multiple parcels stolen from in front of my house, or even better that "I'm sorry we missed you!" card that says please be home during business hours otherwise you can drive some 5km away to pick up your parcel.
Here in an apartment complex, the postie rings through the numbers until someone answers and then leaves me a note saying "Your parcel is with your neighbour at number 71". On the odd occasion where it needs a signature or the building is completely empty, I have 2 UPS parcel points, 3 TNT parcel points, and 3 general post locations within walking distance from my house. The only time this has ever gone wrong is when I walked to the wrong TNT parcel point (It said a certain brand of petrol station, but I didn't realise there were two petrol stations of the same brand so close).
As a member of team inner city living, I too now like not having a problem getting things delivered to me.
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.
Hmm...so, is this park you have, like right across the street from you? How far do you have to haul everything over? What do you do for a grill, haul one of those over too? I have a nice Big Green Egg ceramic grill, and it really isn't terribly portable, but it IS fantastic, I can even cook low and slow on it, fill it with lump charcoal and some wood and it can cook 220F or so overnight. If you're wanting to BBQ and not just "grill"...where do you keep your smoker and firewood stack(s)? You leave that at the park, or do you haul all those over too? Gas grill?
How many friends do you have at your parties...?
And..if you do have it at the park, how far in advance do you have to make reservations? Do you have to pay for that? Can you decide on a whim you want to grill out, or this time of year where I live...have a crawfish boil, and have your spot in the park there for you by the afternoon on a morning you decide to have a wingding?
Sure it can be done, but doesn't sound convenient and you are likely dependent on what every cooking devices the city installs and maintains, and from the parks I"ve seen in my life, those aren't really choice utilities, not easy to get good, consistent results on...
Sharing walls. You must live in some very solid apartments. When I've lived in apts...the walls were usually thin enough to hear people sneeze loudly, much less act as any meaningful barrier to my stereo system. I paid good money for great sound and I don't want to waste it. My sub alone during movie nights shakes the ground....not good for wall attached neighbors.
But again, it is whatever suits you, but I fear your definition of "bbq", and parties differs greatly than mine and what most of my friends and neighbors are here where I live.
I won't even get into where you park your boat...?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........