UPS Tries Delivery Tricycles As Seattle's Traffic Doom Looms (wired.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: Pushing the cargo bike across a rain-soaked parking lot at a UPS distribution center in Seattle, where the shipper showed off its newest delivery vehicle, I had a realization once the pedal assist kicked in. "Yep, this will totally work," I thought. Bike messengers have long known cycling is the fastest way to get around traffic-choked cities. More commuters are getting it too. Now UPS is giving it a shot: The 111-year-old delivery service has started moving packages around Seattle by electric tricycle, in a yearlong pilot.

The vehicle in question was designed and built by Truck Trike in Portland, Oregon. When the rider starts to pedal, human power pushes the front hub. With a thumb throttle, the rider can draw power from a pair of battery packs in the base of the trike to rear hub motors for the back two wheels, with enough juice for 12 to 18 miles of range. The extra power comes in handy because the trailer, made by Portland's Silver Eagle, can fit as many as 40 packages, or about 350 pounds worth of stuff. For UPS the move is pretty spot on, because while the Emerald City is always congested, it's less than two months from what its traffic engineers call the "period of maximum constraint."

That ominous-sounding constrained period arrives on February 4, when the Alaskan Way Viaduct elevated highway along the waterfront is torn down and the 2-mile tunnel Seattle dug to replace it comes online. Crews are finishing the ramps that connect the tunnel to surface roads, and for three weeks, the city won't have a road to get through downtown on the city's waterfront side. To dodge the traffic horror show, Seattleites are planning vacations, renting Airbnbs to stay downtown, anything to avoid driving, including working from home.

Comments

Re:Bicycle yes, tricycle no.

[Mal-2]

As long as they qualify to use the bicycle lanes -- which I'm pretty sure they do -- they can still pass the stopped traffic that can't use bicycle lanes. It remains to be seen how much motorists are willing to watch non-automotive traffic pass them on the right before driving in that lane themselves.

Re:Bicycle yes, tricycle no.

[93 Escort Wagon]

Unless things have changed recently, Seattle allows bicycles to ride on the sidewalks. It also has a lot of bike lanes, thanks to a previous mayor who biked himself and decided to arbitrarily take lanes away from cars. Believe me, you don't want to be driving in Seattle.

But the article has its dates and underlying assumptions wrong. The traffic nightmare up here is scheduled to start January 11, when the viaduct gets shut down - it ends on February 5, when the new tunnel is scheduled to open. The three-week closure is apparently necessary so they can finish the ramps from the old viaduct approaches into the tunnel. During that closure, all the cars which normally would use the viaduct (or the tunnel) are going to be shunted onto the already-overburdened Interstate 5 and downtown surface streets.

Motor assist is a good idea

[steveha]

350 lbs requires power assistance huh? I guess UPS has never seen a guy on a bike in India deliver a package the size of a school bus on his own power.

Hi, I live in the Seattle area and I spend a lot of time riding bikes.

Seattle is hilly. The downtown core where the packages most likely need delivery is... also hilly.

If any packages need delivery to Queen Anne Hill, that's so steep I wouldn't want to ride that even with 10 pounds of packages. If any packages need delivery to the hospitals, we literally call that area "Pill Hill", as in there is a big hill with the hospitals on it.

Wikipedia has a list of hills in Seattle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_hills_of_Seattle

And here's an article about how the hilly streets are challenging to folks with mobility issues: https://crosscut.com/2017/02/seattles-hills-are-the-worst-heres-a-way-to-cope

The hills are sufficiently bad that there is an official city program of rights-of-way that go through skyscrapers downtown. Instead of walking up a hill you cut through a skyscraper and use their escalators. I say again this is an official thing... I spent some time working in one of the skyscrapers on one of the routes. (I haven't found anything about this online with Google searches, but I remember reading a plaque in the skyscraper where I worked listing the guaranteed hours that the escalators were open to the public as part of this program.) Of course, UPS tricycles can't use escalators and wouldn't be allowed to even if it were possible.

It is entirely appropriate to have a motor assist if we are talking about 350 pounds of packages.

Actually it wouldn't surprise me if UPS wanted to have a motor assist even in flat places (Kansas maybe?), because it won't add that much to the expense of a special delivery tricycle and the motor will provide more speed. More speed is more packages delivered and thus more money.

So your comment is +1 snarky but -2 clueless.