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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.
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
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)
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.
"Park wherever you want, boys - it's already paid for!"
I work in Seattle. I rarely drive, though - I take transit (mostly the Sounder and Link light rail nowadays; but I rode busses a lot before). Generally speaking, I have little sympathy for people who insist on driving into the city all the time.
Having said that - I think the cities' arguments here are disingenuous. Over the past 15-20 years, Seattle has intentionally gone on a "parking diet" for various reasons (creating bike lane space; explicitly trying to force people onto transit; etc.). There is now far less roadside parking than there was 20-30 years ago, despite the growth the city has seen... and I doubt Seattle is the only city that has made these choices.
So if Seattle has a problem with UPS and FedEx drivers double-parking and blocking traffic, it's likely a problem they've created themselves.
#DeleteChrome
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.........
... and I doubt Seattle is the only city that has made these choices.
Go visit Tokyo, which has very little street parking. Downtown street parking is wasteful. Streets should be for driving, and parking lots/garages should be for parking. Eliminating street parking frees up lanes for traffic, and cuts down on the number of cars circling the block looking for a space. In SF about 40% of traffic is people looking for parking.
But changing to a more efficient system is difficult because of the politics of parking.
> 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
a locked metal cage full of packages
The Japanese are pretty law abiding. In Seattle, that would result in a rush of hobos with crow-bars.
Have gnu, will travel.
The Japanese are pretty law abiding.
Japan is also extremely non-diverse.
There's a very important lesson to be learned in those two facts.
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...
I rarely drive, though
No offense but with your username, I can see why. ;)
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.
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.