It’s nice to see larger outlets talking about urbanism topics and Vox has made a few videos in this area recently.
No thank you. This can work in maybe a small town. Or a small NY neighborhood.
But in most situations:
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A fleet of bikers is more expensive than a single van. I’m referring to human cost.
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The amount of product that gets shipped cannot scale with how many bikers we would need.
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the weight of products puts more physical labor on the biker.
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A biker carrying 500lbs of product on the road is dangerous for everyone. Products falling. Losing control over their bike. You can create artificial limits, and companies will ALWAYS hit the max and go a bit more. Always been the case.
This isn’t solving the root issues, of why people hate cars, which is Single occupancy cars flooding highways and creating pollution.
This isn’t a theoretical, it already exists and it already works. Cargo bikes can deliver parcels faster than vans in some cases, they can carry large loads, ebikes make up for the labour, riders have much better awareness of the world around them than van drivers, and don’t have all the extra mass of a van that will cause damage in the event of a crash. And it doesn’t have to work in every situation, it can take vans off the road sometimes and that’s still good.
I like what someone else mentioned of bikes doing the last mile or two. Vans could do the last 20 miles or whatever, and bigger trucks or trains the long haul.
I would also not put vans and box trucks (not that you did, I’m speaking in general) in the same bag, a van is almost the same as a car when it comes to driving.
And of course if we could lower the demands on delivery drivers (and riders? Not sure what you call them on bikes) it would lower accidents. I recently saw one of the new Amazon electric vans, and while I liked some things (no air or sound pollution), the driver was accelerating like crazy every time.
I’m amazed by the level of cognitive distortions employed when attempting to rationalize choosing cars over bikes!
Arguing that bicycles pose a greater danger than motorized vehicles like trucks or cars requires a significant amount of fact twisting.
When you consider the safety of everyone involved, bikes are just considerably safer than cars. Just think about how many pedestrians were fatally injured by bikes last year, and compare that to the number killed by cars.
This is only accounting for direct fatalities. Cars also contribute to a substantial number of indirect deaths due to air pollution in urban areas, and they accelerate climate change, which will have huge consequences on everyone’s life.
How can we make life even more dangerous and difficult for delivery drivers? Now they can’t even hope to escape the weather even a little. Let alone the dangers of biking in traffic. Making the excuse that we should improve bike safety does absolutely nothing to save lives now and is pretty fucking insensitive and elitist.
More bike infrastructure and non-car road users would make it safer for them and all of us.
“We can’t ever do anything about how bad it is.”
You know tons of them are already zipping around on dangerous roadways with no protection available to them right?
Having been a driver for Amazon in the past for around a year and a half, I’ll tell you right now that these bikes wouldn’t work in a lot of places Amazon delivers. In dense urban areas? Sure, but certainly not out in the ‘burbs or rural areas.
Package counts on those routes can top out around 500. There’s no way Amazon would purposely reduce the amount of work they lay onto one driver.
Now that being said, if they loosened their iron grip over the drivers then I can absolutely see this happening in downtowns and some apartment complexes. Outside of really densely packed areas, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Some routes have drivers going well over 100 miles in a day. No way anyone’s gonna do that on a bike. And in the middle of summer in southern cities? Forget about it. Amazon doesn’t even give drivers enough time to find a bathroom, no way they’ll allow drivers to take breaks to cool off.
@SuiXi3D @mondoman712 From the OP: “It’s time to replace *URBAN* delivery vans.”
Those urban routes are often the ones with the most packages. No way Amazon hires four people to do the job of one.
Why’s it taking so long for that couch I ordered to get here?
A couch would probably need a box van to deliver it lol, I don’t think you can easily fit one into a standard panel van without getting a little creative
Have you seen Renault Master, one of the most popular work vans in Europe? Shit’s huuuge inside😉 You can fit a 3-seat coach, 2 armchairs, coffee table and a floor lamp inside, along with a 100" TV.
Wait do Europeans measure tvs in inches? If so I’m so sorry about what my country has done. I swear some of us are trying to metricate.
Not watching some dumb video to know how dumb inefficient and ineffective this is.