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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.
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 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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Yep. Pretty much. 98% of everyone on a bike is an epic douche.. it's up to 100% when they're delivering something.
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.
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.
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