It's time to replace urban delivery vans

It's nice to see larger outlets talking about urbanism topics and Vox has made a few videos in this area recently.

79 comments

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.
- You forgot to mention that you do this each day every day. Not a once a year or once a quarter thing.
- Go to a third world country, they'll get that done with a cargo bike no sweat

For those of you getting riled up to point out how this wouldn't work in rural Nebraska - yeah no shit!
This video is taking about how it can be very beneficial for urban areas to use electric cargo bikes rather than vans, and how it helps everyone to remove the amount of vehicles in inner cities by providing safer ways for bikes to move around (and better for emissions too!). The parcel services in my city all have hubs where lorry's drop off pallets, and then bike porters to take the parcels for the final mile. It works great.
Everytime there's a video about the benefits of bike infrastructure or public transport the online discourse gets filled with pointless bad faith drivel about how public transport or bike lanes don't work in an area with a population density of 0.000001/km^2. No one is claiming that's the case, and no one benefits from you pointing that out. Get a grip.
- Or you could make electric cars. That would be neat and it works great outside of cities and even in hilly cities. Even during winter or scorching summers.
  
  Pollution is not the only issue with cars. In fact, I would argue that this is not the main one in cities. A car has negative impact on infrastructure, public space sharing, safety, etc. Electric or not.
  
  Yeah or we could be well informed on the actual issues instead. We'll choose that rather than this stupid nonsense. Cities are not rural. Rural are not cities.

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.
- It's not even an article, it's a fucking video.
- I just posted this link on micromobility and almost 100% of the comments were like that!

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.
- 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.

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.
- I was in Paris a couple weeks ago and literally everyone delivering things were on cargo e-bikes or e-trikes. Bikes and cars coexisted on roads but there was also a lot of dedicated bike and pedestrian roads too.
  
  Yeah, Paris isn't Florida, that's fersher!
- There's a lot of places in the world that aren't florida
- Yes would need better bike infrastructure before this is reasonable.
- I think cars should be prioritised for commercial use. It serves more people like a bus or train does to public transport. In fact a van with more parcels would eliminate more trips from individual homes to the post office by car. That said. Cars shouldn’t be the only option for delivery for sure. Depending on the city and delivery region.
  
  Exactly, this post completely misses the point. The human in a delivery van is not even desirable. It would be great to completely automate this job. Let people enjoy their lives more instead of peeing in a bottle.

These vans are a hell of a lot better than semis, which IMO should not be allowed in cities. I'd be fine with more of these vans being around if it meant we could get rid of large 18 wheelers in urban areas.

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..

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.
  
  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.

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

First let me start by saying fuck cars, i dont like the fact that the world infrastructure is centered around them when trains (be it coal or electric) and rails exist. And now on to the rage baith:
I dont like that this pretty much shifts the reaponsibility from big corporations polution onto its workers, if delivery people had a union this would be an absolute no no, because its asking way more phisical push with what is going to be the same amount of packages with the same low pay with way more effort from the part of the worker, when we know that the polluting monsters are the companies they work for and the tech the companies employ and refuses to change into more sustainable ones, like planes, factories in some cases and the waste they produce and irresponsibly dump, be it abroad with uncaring legislations or locally. While i too would like a total redesign of urban infrastructure to suportt more sustainable transportation technologies, whe are gonna have to do with what we have (at least for the moment) and a better answer for that specifically imo would be fully electric vehicles, and in keeping with the taking less space theme, electric cargo motorbikes (the ones that dont have pedals). The same as the ones like the pizza delivery ones but with rechargable batteries instead of a gas engine.
Oh btw downvotes to the right.

I would absolutely use one of these and my bike (except when the temp is over 100°F/38°C) if the infrastructure was there. My previous apartment was on a road with a bike lane that led to a bike path near my work so I used to take that when weather permitted.

Not watching some dumb video to know how dumb inefficient and ineffective this is.
- If you don't care so much, why bother commenting?
  
  Oh I care. Just not enough to watch some dumb YouTube short.

Isn't this a big step backwards?
- Idk. We have moped delivery here in Vietnam, and I w incredibly fast and efficient. Packages are even moved daily in transit buses that connect cities.
- How so?
  
  The capacity, i think its a downgrade of the capacity. ( Could lead to multiple trips i guess RIP driver )
- Welcome to Fuck Cars
  
  Lol, should have read the sub title.

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?

No thank you. This can work in maybe a small town. Or a small NY neighborhood.
But in most situations:
A fleet of bikers is more expensive than a single van. I'm referring to human cost.
The amount of product that gets shipped cannot scale with how many bikers we would need.
the weight of products puts more physical labor on the biker.
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.

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.
  
  Ive moved using a LWB van. Could have probably fitted 3 couches easily 6 if I stacked em.
  A Post or car derived van can take one easily possibly 2

79 comments