Cities Seek Deliverance From the E-Commerce Boom

["Dave Farber" <farber () gmail com>]

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne () warpspeed com>
> Subject: [Dewayne-Net] Cities Seek Deliverance From the E-Commerce Boom
> Date: April 30, 2017 at 4:16:16 PM EDT
> To: Multiple recipients of Dewayne-Net <dewayne-net () warpspeed com>
> Reply-To: dewayne-net () warpspeed com
>
> [Note:  This item comes from friend David Rosenthal.  DLH]
>
> Cities Seek Deliverance From the E-Commerce Boom
> It’s the flip-side to the “retail apocalypse:” A siege of delivery trucks is threatening to choke cities with 
> traffic. But not everyone agrees on what to do about it.
> By ANDREW ZALESKI
> Apr 20 2017
> <https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2017/04/cities-seek-deliverance-from-the-e-commerce-boom/523671/>
>
> Just before 3 in the afternoon on a rainy spring day, Keith Greenleaf busts out his “bricklaying” skills. That’s 
> delivery-driver parlance for balancing an inordinate amount of cardboard boxes on a metal handcart. As high as his 
> collarbone he stacks them, packages labeled HP, J. Crew, Amazon Prime. “This is probably one of the first days I 
> don’t have Pampers or dog food,” he says.
>
> Greenleaf also doesn’t have any 60-pound boxes of copier paper, which is a welcome way to finish his daily rounds.The 
> veteran UPS driver is parked near 22nd and I St. in Washington, D.C., having arrived there about six hours earlier in 
> a truck loaded down with 320 boxes. In a few hours he’ll drive back to the distribution center in Landover, Maryland; 
> several hours after that, he’ll be at Outback Steakhouse downing beers with a few fellow drivers.
>
> Right now, however, Greenleaf’s in the thick of it. For 15 of his 25 years driving for UPS, he has delivered along 
> roughly a 10-block route close to 22nd and I. Several years ago, to meet the demand, UPS shortened Greenleaf’s route 
> by two blocks and gave them to a new driver on a new route. When I meet up with him mid-afternoon one Friday (per UPS 
> media ride-along convention, I’ve been given my own iconic brown uniform, including pants so baggy MC Hammer would 
> cringe), he’s unloading boxes from his parked truck onto a loading dock underneath the Residences on the Avenue, an 
> apartment building with a Whole Foods right next door. As I get ready to climb aboard, he tells me we won’t be making 
> any deliveries in the truck.
>
> Several years ago, the 56-year-old was delivering mainly to commercial locations. Now half his drop-offs are 
> residential. The traffic congestion and lack of available parking has become so unworkable that Greenleaf would 
> rather walk the remainder of his route, delivering packages by handcart, which is what he’s done every afternoon for 
> the last three years.
>
> Pick any other major city or metropolitan area in the U.S., and the situation’s probably the same: a massive surge in 
> deliveries to residential dwellings, one that’s outstripping deliveries to commercial establishments and creating a 
> traffic nightmare.
>
> Consumers today are spending less time in local stores and more time online, buying not only retail items but also 
> such goods as groceries from Peapod, office supplies from Postmates, and whatever the hell they want from Amazon. 
> It’s estimated that, on average, every person in the U.S. generates demand for roughly 60 tons of freight each year, 
> according to the National Capital Region Transportation Planning Board. In 2010, the United States Post Office—which 
> has overtaken both FedEx and UPS as the largest parcel-delivery service in the country—delivered 3.1 billion packages 
> nationwide; last year, the USPS delivered more than 5.1 billion packages. The growth in e-commerce is fueling a 
> commensurate rise in the number of delivery vehicles—box trucks, smaller vans, and cars alike—on city streets.
>
> While truck traffic currently represents about 7 percent of urban traffic in American cities, it bears a 
> disproportionate congestion cost of $28 billion, or about 17 percent of the total U.S. congestion costs, in wasted 
> hours and gas. Cities, struggling to keep up with the deluge of delivery drivers, are seeing their curb space and 
> streets overtaken by double-parked vehicles, to say nothing of the bonus pollution and roadwear produced thanks to a 
> surfeit of Amazon Prime orders.
>
> “A humongous amount of externalities are being produced,” says José Holguín-Veras, director of the Center of 
> Excellence for Sustainable Urban Freight Systems at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “Every 25 people produce one 
> Internet delivery. … So imagine any congested city you know of. Imagine that you were to increase freight traffic by 
> a factor of three. This is what’s happening now.”
>
> UPS driver Keith Greenleaf is doing less driving in the city these days: Most of his urban drop-offs need to be done 
> via hand-cart, because of traffic congestion. (Andrew Zaleski/CityLab)
> It didn’t used to be like this.
>
> The urban home-delivery ecosystem of yore evokes images of icemen making their rounds or kindly white-capped milk men 
> stopping by with a new glass bottle. City dwellers, with their density of retail options within close walking 
> distance, often had newspapers and perishables delivered daily, but in the earlier decades of the 20th century, home 
> delivery of purchased goods was typically something arranged after a trip to the store, where shoppers tried on or 
> tested out the clothes and furniture they wanted, and then scheduled what they couldn’t carry back by hand or in 
> taxis or streetcars to be dropped off later. It was for this very purpose that UPS was founded in 1907 in Seattle. 
> Overall, though, bulk deliveries predominated. These were deliveries of large retail goods to stores in shopping 
> districts, where some thought had been given to how streets would accommodate trucks.
>
> In recent years, urban dwellers have managed to flip the script. Since the beginning of this decade, online retail 
> sales in the U.S. have grown by about 15 percent every year. So consider a UPS driver like Greenleaf 110 years later: 
> On any given weekday, he’s one of an average of 241 drivers making deliveries on D.C.’s streets, delivering products 
> like clothes, books, food, and household goods—stuff that shoppers could easily pick up on their own at area stores. 
> (Often, he’s dropping off boxes of toiletries to residents in an apartment building with a pharmacy or a grocery 
> store on the same block.)
>
> [snip]
>
> Dewayne-Net RSS Feed: <http://dewaynenet.wordpress.com/feed/>




-------------------------------------------
Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/247/=now
RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/247/18849915-ae8fa580
Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-aa268125
Unsubscribe Now: 
https://www.listbox.com/unsubscribe/?member_id=18849915&id_secret=18849915-32545cb4&post_id=20170430163308:35C5EBE6-2DE4-11E7-AB52-E5E8D2C75D86
Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com