It’s nice to see larger outlets talking about urbanism topics and Vox has made a few videos in this area recently.
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Erm how am I meant to take my grandma to hospital and also drop off three fridges and my kids to school and then an entire building’s worth of bricks? Therefore cargo bikes will never work in any situation. I am very smart.
Why is noone mentioning that this video was sponsored by Delta Airlines?
I am not saying that the content isnt good but it is somehow strange to me that an Airline of all companies is sponsoring such a video
Air travel is quite polluting, of course I would expect such companies to have a PR budget focused on that kind of thing…
I haven’t read the article and am here to give my ignorant opinion. This wouldn’t work ever anywhere for any reason. Thank you.
Instinctually, I don’t like this idea. I’m all for eliminating cars and roads, but delivery drivers are already vulnerable and exploited enough. I can’t imagine delivering packages for Amazon in the searing heat here in Florida while every car tried to run you off the road.
Yes would need better bike infrastructure before this is reasonable.
Outside of dense urban core there just isn’t enough packages per mile to make this even slightly sane. Outside of temperate areas this would be awful when the weather is very cold or very hot. In all areas you would have to secure the packages against trivial theft and rain further adding to the weight and decreasing maximum cargo area.
Even in the fraction of places where this would be practicable differences in speed and cargo capacity means you would need more drivers to achieve the same results. It makes 100x more sense to to push ebikes as an alternative to commuters.
It says urban in the title. And cargo bikes can deliver packages faster than vans.
Yeah, we already see these in places like NYC. There’s definitally room to make improvment in select areas like that
It looks like they believe they can replace 10% of Vans with bikes if they use Vans or trucks to move stuff to local pickup points and can thereby replace 10% of their vans with bikes in very dense urban core. This is interesting but underwhelming.
Where did you get 10% from, the article says
Recent estimates from Europe suggest that up to 51% of all freight journeys in cities could be replaced by cargo bike
Are we redefining moving all freight to collection points near endpoints with all vans all the time and moving 51% the last 3 miles as handling 51% of freight with bikes? Even so call me when you’ve actually done it some places
I don’t work in logistics, so I won’t be doing this. You can read the paper quoted and that should answer your questions: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2352146516000478
In my city this wouldn’t work, the millisecond the delivery guy turns away his head, assholes would have stolen all the deliveries. It could be used only from point to point, not fully loaded with hundreds of small deliveries
An armored crate would increase the weight too much for human propulsion
@Moonrise2473 @mondoman712 you can have locked boxes on cargo bikes… It ain’t rocket science
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.
I believe it. Doesn’t mean Amazon does.
In the US?
Wow dude when you lose the point just concede.
It’s the kind of thing that’s going to work in some areas and not others. It’ll be much more viable in most of Europe for instance as overall it’s much more urbanised than the USA.
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?
Who are you quoting?
They’ve already taken dangerous jobs so clearly their lives aren’t worth considering right?
