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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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:
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'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?
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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