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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.
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.
Seattle is a hilly city. The guys downtown making deliveries up and down steep hills with carts and/or handtrucks full of parcels kinds of made this inevitable...
Bike messengers have long known cycling is the fastest way to get around traffic-choked cities.
A bicycle can be much faster over short/medium distances in a congested city, because of their ability to trivially by-pass stationary traffic.
However, a tricycle does not have this ability, being orders of magnitude wider than a bicycle. Now add the encumbrance of a trailer - especially one of sufficient capacity to make the exercise even remotely worthwhile - and you have no chance of moving through or around stationary traffic... unless you plan on riding on the pavements ("sidewalks" as the Americans call them).
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The real reason that bike messengers get through quicker is that they mostly ignore traffic laws and signs, and take shortcuts across sidewalks and other places they are NOT supposed to be!
Have a look at this puppy. Its foldable solar charger, ect.. screecher.net/products/screecher-pedalcycle
[($)]
Only fair to try something new in Seattle, it is their home town. (but they have tried it elsewhere as well.) The trikes will be less fun in the cold wet weather on the hills. Good luck.
The major problem we have is all the wasted public space used for private car storage on our surface streets, which would be better repurposed to higher-capacity bike and transit usage.
I for one look forward to our new Amazon-controlled UPS bike overlords, provided they don't get massive subsides like the private car storage on surface streets get.
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UPS has been using electric-assist tricycles for a while in Europe.
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The extra power comes in handy because...40 packages, or about 350 pounds worth of stuff.
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.
You ever seen mothers riding bikes with the trailers with their child in them? I have seen bikes pull carts behind them with animals also. Why wouldn't this work on deliveries? No, you won't have a truck full of deliveries. But you S.A.F. could deliver packages this way.
Anonymous comments are as pathetic as the anonymous "sources" that contaminate gutless journalism from the New York Time
They should use quads. More stable and humorous to watch. Vroom Vroom!
So instead of a big slow truck I need to give a wide berth, there's multiple, big slow tricycles I need to give an even wider berth?
There will be more of them because they can't carry as many packages. They'll expect special treatment, run stop signs and red lights, etc. just like "cyclists". When they cause a collision with a regular vehicle, scorn will by default apply to the driver of the regular vehicle because the "cyclist" is more likely to end up with injuries despite it being their fault. Such attitudes will spill over into insurance dealings and even the courtroom.
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.
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I saw one of these in Rome last month. Perfect for getting around the narrow streets and alleys there, I assumed it was just a local adaptation. I would be interested to know how long they've been in use in Italy, or elsewhere.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
The affected downtown Seattle area has bike lanes and separate bike stoplights. There is an existing culture wherein bikes are more commonplace that most metropolitan areas. Being very opposed to any solution without understanding the problem space is ignorant noise.
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The affected downtown Seattle area has bike lanes and separate bike stoplights. There is an existing culture wherein bikes are more commonplace that most metropolitan areas. Being very opposed to any solution without understanding the problem space is ignorant noise.
Ah yes, bike lanes, where the bikes go and run red lights and stop signs, or where they comes from when weaving into traffic on the left or onto the sidewalk on the right to get around other bikes.
Yamato aka Black Cat using in Japan cities for quite a while peddle trikes, bikes with trailers, including some with electric assistance. These bikes move slow and easier to park.
"It's dangerous, and kills people."
Citation needed. Lethal bicycle/pedestrian collisions are not a problem worth solving and bicycles are legally allowed on sidewalks in many places. Far more dangerous are bicycle/car collisions.
Both of them.
Sounds a whole lot like what cars do. How dare bikes want to get around other bikes, don't they know the world is a no passing zone?
Like everything else related to the Pacific Northwest, this sounds utterly terrible. Perhaps some hipsters should be sacrificed to improve the situation.
My questions are practical, engineering-types...will these tricycles be equipped with discarded-dope-needle-proof tires? Will they also have wide, full-coverage, flared fenders so as to not "fling poo" when they cycle through the human feces on the streets from all the homeless drug addicts?
Such a lack of important engineering specifications and technical details is shameful for a tech site!
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Electric bikes automatically regulate motor power based on pedal power (for every W the cyclist produces, the motor produces n W). This level is adjustable in steps, but once set, no manual operation is necessary.
Thumb operation seems a crappy solution in comparison.