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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.
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.