It’s nice to see larger outlets talking about urbanism topics and Vox has made a few videos in this area recently.
You must log in or register to comment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 )
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.
Welcome to Fuck Cars
Lol, should have read the sub title.
deleted by creator
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
