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.
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
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.
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!
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.
I don’t disagree, but I think that we can remove most of that and still have electric lorries delivering goods.
Busses, trains, trams etc instead of cars, with good parking I rural commute hubs
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.
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.
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.
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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?
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.
It’s a mystery and we all wish that we didn’t.
Due to how TV, monitor, laptop, phone and loudspeaker manufacturers specify things, most europeans operate quite freely with inches. 15" laptops are still marketed as 15" laptops here, not 38cm laptops. We just got used to it.
Just dont start speaking to europeans about fluid ounces, bushels of wheat and other such weird things🙃
If it makes you feel any better Americans probably are more familiar with centimeters than fluid ounces except in certain quantities. I can visualize 12, 16, or 32oz, but only be a freedom juice is sold in those quantities. Meanwhile that same product is why I can imagine 2L.
As for bushels, I can’t even picture my state’s bushel of corn, much less an Iowa bushel of wheat and yeah I recall state and product mattering for the volume of a bushel.
This sort of thing is part of why I’m so pro US metrication. I don’t want a 38cm laptop, I want a 40cm laptop that I hook up to my 1m tv. I want agricultural goods measured in kg at market. Metrication didn’t hold because we converted reasonable numbers in us customary to less round numbers in metric. The average American has no idea how many fluid ounces are in a 2L bottle of soda despite it being required by law to be on the label.
And the thing is that we’re increasingly having to understand it. No us customary units work well for medication. Disaster by disaster engineers switch to metric. Baked goods are easier to make in metric because you use weight and grams are just better for it. Everyday measurements are just easier in metric because fucking hell teaspoons suck.
But yeah sorry my country’s dumbass measurement system is an international standard for literally anything
As a European who knows imperial units, it’s not how it works for us, and it’s not the point.
I can tell you approximately what a litre is the same way you can judge a gallon. By experience. By comparison. You know a “gallon of milk”, I know “a litre of milk”.
I can tell you what a meter is, but that doesn’t give me the power to tell your height to the centimeter.
Just today, I had to mop up a water leak. I couldn’t have told you how many litres it was until I had it in the bucket, because it was spread out on the floor.
The point of the metric system is not that everything is tidy, that a screen is not 38 cm but 40 cm.
The point is that I can tell you that 10 40cm screens are 4 meters. That a ton of water is 1000 kg, which is a cubic meter, which is 100x100x100 cm.
The problem with imperial units is not the units themselves, it’s the confusing calculations you have to take because you have a different unit which is 3, 12, 16, etc times the other unit.
How much is 16 1/3 cubic foot in inches. That is the issue at hand.
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
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
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
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 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.
Isn’t this a big step backwards?
Welcome to Fuck Cars
Lol, should have read the sub title.
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 )
yeah faster but less in cargo.
One study in London found that only a small share of vans used more than 3/4 of their capacity. Most use less than half.
yeah but cargo bikes has like max 1/4 capacity. But yeah i am nothing against cargo bikes ;) Its a better alternative. I am just pointing that out.
Not all routes would need that much capacity, right? The less busy ones can use two-wheelers.
The öess busy ones are outside the city ( where they would drive like 30+ minutes ), its a good exercise i guess. I am fully for such delivery bikes. They literally block the whole street and say “fuck cars” directly out to the world.
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Just because bikes don’t work for some things, doesn’t mean they can’t be used for others. Use the best tool for the job.
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Who wants to outlaw delivery vans?
How big is the market for 300 kilograms of photocopiers? I’m pretty sure an average few streets of web shopping, a bag here, a coat there, a few mugs two houses over and two boxes of LEGO on the other side of the block, stuff like that. This sounds easily doable by cargo bike, assuming the infrastructure is sufficiently geared towards bikes of course.
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Let me rephrase it: how big is the market of domestic/household users for 300 kgs of photocopiers? Of course commercial shipments are a class on their own, while household cargo is generally so reliant on a handful of small packages every week or so that you can do that by bakfiets.
@DLSchichtl @Iron_Lynx of course there are things that can’t be delivered in bicycles and of course this only make sense with enough density.
But density is a goal of urbanism.The places in the world that currently have success doing bicycle deliveries right now allow night time or off peak van/truck deliveries.
Most deliveries are small packages, especially the deliveries that are time sensitive and so are ideal for cargo bike delivery.
The 2-3 photocopier deliveries a week are done with a van at night.
