tandempower

I think if there had been a good reason, they would have given it when they cut the program. More than likely someone was just biased against it. There is a lot of reflection on the car culture as a holistic economic scenario and people are thinking whether they want to encourage CF culture, when it is growing in popularity. In short, people see change happening and it starts to scare them about whether the future will be ok if the change continues. That's when you get a backlash; i.e. because people are insecure about a future that's different from what they know. They add up all the benefits of automotive economies and they decide it's worth the drawbacks and harm, because they don't think in terms of long-term sustainability, just in terms of towing the line on a culture that generates short-term security.

This is the wrong way to look it at, i.e. as cars being a default and bikes having to be superior or otherwise being kept out of the equation. Bikes are more efficient and cost efficient in many ways, and if you fail to take advantage of the opportunity they provide to improve efficiency, you are investing in a time-bomb. It is the same as if you would look at vegetables as not doing anything that can't be achieved by eating pizza and taking laxatives. It might work for a while, but gradually you're going to become worse and worse off because you didn't take advantage of an opportunity to do something in a more healthy and sustainable way.

Siu Blue Wind

We have one person going back to topic as a moderator has asked, and others, not so much.

Please stop nit picking on each other. If you guys don't like what the other is saying, then it's not up to you to change their mind.

prj71

What hasn't been noted here is that Amazon has actually taken a lot of cars off the road.

I have packages from Amazon coming to my house almost weekly. Amazon pantry, subscribe and save items. Things that I would normally get by jumping into the car and driving to the store to buy...now I have them delivered to my house. Less money spent on gas, less wear and tear on my car, more time for me to do my leisurely activities. I know many people that have done the same.

I-Like-To-Bike

Several years ago, I was in the market for a new TV. Rode my bike to the nearest Walmart about 5 miles from home and saw the 40'' flat screen model I wanted and realized that the boxed TV would not even fit into my Nissan Sentra. Went online and saw that Amazon had the identical model for $20 less with free shipping. The boxed TV was delivered by UPS to my door two days later. Couldn't have been simpler. Walmart now offers free home delivery too. I have used that for home delivery of cat litter and fruit juice for convenience and save wear and tear on my bicycle which I normally use for Walmart shopping.

Bicycles and bicycle couriers likely to be a practical, economic or "efficient" delivery option for such an enterprise? Not a chance in the real world. Nor would such an option become practical, economic or efficient because someone wishes it were true. Except perhaps in a fantasy world where the couriers will work hard in all weather conditions, all year for next to nothing, such an option can deliver a few lightweight packages here and there regardless of the economics and physics.

prj71

The advent of Amazon has taken many people off the road with their cars driving to numerous stores to buy the items they need. Amazon is one stop shop...don't have to leave the house and you can shop in your undies!!!

tandempower

Another way to look at it is this: how often do you buy a TV? Once every 10 or 20 years? For big deliveries, you definitely need big, powerful vehicles. But should the people driving those big powerful vehicles also deliver all the small, bikeable parcels with them, or is that a waste?

With buses you can see the waste when buses drive around empty at non-peak times. Yet for people to rely on the bus for transportation, you need robust schedules and route coverage. Certainly autonomous vehicle ride-sharing could help the situation with buses, i.e because having the extra small vehicles available to fill in for buses during off-peak times would not be difficult.

Now think about that same logic with parcel delivery: if you can reduce the number of large powerful vehicles and trips of those vehicles by using smaller vehicles for smaller deliveries, you've gained efficiency. The problem is finding couriers who will work under all conditions, as you mention. I think this problem will be solved by small autonomous delivery vehicles like the ones Kroger will be testing. As I said, bike couriers could be used by developing a points system for rating at-will couriers so that cyclists could have the freedom to take parcels instead of the drones when they want to. This sounds fickle, but autonomous technologies, automation, and flexible management should continue to grow because they are natural outcomes of technological progress.

Mobile 155

I agree that Amazon is looking to please the customer so they don't go somewhere else. The point is to make you happy enough to shop again with then rather than someone else. If you have to change services and personnel every time you source out a delivery while that one delivery might seem more efficient the system is not. You may be getting a TV and someone 1/2 of a mile down the road may be getting a T-shirt. another mile down the road someone is getting a hat rack and a toaster. Multiply that by 100 deliveries and while dropping off the T-shirt with a bicycle or even by foot sounds good the Van delivering the other 99 items is going right by the T-shirt house anyway. Having to get it to a bicycle rider and transfer it so they can deliver it doesn't decrease cost because you are paying the driver of the Van and the cyclist to drive down the same street, that is how routing works. Having it dropped off at a locker does the same thing and only adds the customer as part of the delivery system. In fact picking it up yourself would be just as easy if you went to Wally world and got it without paying for shipping. And if Wally World ever offered free shipping people would start ordering from them.

tandempower

They do. It's called site-to-store and that's how I order things because then I know I can return it to the store without having to mail it back to a seller.

What you are basically saying is that having fixed-route delivery trucks and delivering to every address along the route is most efficient. That is like saying if everyone took the city bus everywhere, that would be the most efficient. But as you know and love, people have choice and exercise it, so buses often run empty. For this reason, the only options for gaining efficiency is to either somehow reduce people's choice so they all take the same bus and ship their parcels via the same truck OR figure out ways to use the least-expensive vehicle for the most packages. Otherwise you are running more expensive vehicles empty because multiple carriers are sharing the overall shipping load. That's basically what's happening now with UPS, USPS, FEDEX, and now Amazon.

If people didn't mind all picking up their packages at the Amazon lockers, that would be the most efficient; but as you say some people find that inconvenient, so the most efficient way to deal with that is to have a local person deliver the unclaimed packages door-to-door by bike, car, or whatever. Then the big vans are free to go back and forth to the warehouse and deliver the few big, heavy loads like TVs.

Mobile 155

I thought we were't talking?

CliffordK

Since they initially started the bike program, somebody had to support it.

We don't see all the behind the scenes decision making involved with cancelling the programs. Obviously, corporations can be unique, and can ignore $10,000 worth of profit, if everything else makes $1M+.

However, it is more likely that the bikes weren't meeting economic demands and goals.

For bikes to compete with vehicles, they need to be able to compete on:

• Speed
• Turnaround speed
• Overall cost per delivery
• Distance?
• Reliability? Flats, breakdowns, requirements for service.
• Missed delivery deadlines?
• etc.

What overall benefits does dealing with tiny bicycles and e-cargo cycles bring to a company?

Perhaps it is just a matter of time for fuel prices to double... $6 per gallon? $10 per gallon?

There are actually a few potential advantages of the E-Bikes. For example, if one had a hub, the bike could potentially stop by the hub in the morning, fill up, deliver, then return a couple of times throughout the day for more loads. That may seem inefficient, but potentially a customer could order an item at noon, have it pulled, put on the bike, and delivered by 1:00 PM, while the big vans all loaded early in the AM, and the order would be sitting around the shop for the next day.

They could, of course, run minivans, but those may also have issues. Better fuel efficiency, but still hurting in capacity and labor costs.

Ultra-rapid turnaround might help with customer satisfaction, although, they might come to expect it, so the next time the order doesn't come until the next day, they'll be mad.

One of the issues, of course, is that most of Amazon's warehouses are being built on the outskirts of town, so it makes it harder to zip in and out mid-day. Doing deliveries for a department store might be easier since they often have stores scattered throughout the city.

A 40" TV would be on the small size for my cargo bike/trailer. I often am carrying stuff that is too big for a small car. My trailer is even easier to load than a pickup where one must heft the stuff up about 3 feet in the air (although I often spend some time tying down).

The problem is not that single 40" TV, or even a 60" TV. The issue is when the bike has to deliver 10 of them, and they simply don't fit. Nonetheless, the billed "last mile" delivery of that 60" TV is likely at least $20. So, distributing 10 of them would be a full day's wages.

LanghamP

A partial answer, possibly suitable for some but not all US cities, is what I saw that was very popular in Leipzig; the front cargo bicycle. I would guess 4-5 50 inch TV's could be placed in them.

I saw a great number, innumerable it seemed, being commercially operated, many electrical. Leipzig is pretty flat.

Walter S

Already done.

I-Like-To-Bike

It does for many/most orders over $35. Does not include perishable products.https://www.walmart.com/cp/free-shipping/1088989

Walter S

Bikes already compete with cars favorably for low cost delivery of lightweight packages in dense urban areas. They're called couriers. They're already well developed where it makes economic sense, and not where it does not. Is this BF thread going to turn this on its head somehow? I doubt it.

tandempower

I don't really pay attention to who posts a message unless it is offensive and/or provocative/aggressive in some way. Often I just respond to content if I have a response, regardless of whose post it is I am responding to. To me online discussion is just supposed to be online publishing in the form of dialogue. It irritates me that I have to deal with interpersonal issues with other posters.

This is the whole problem. It is generally the cause of waste in business. I once worked for a business that sold cooked chicken. They wasted a lot of chicken and it bothered me so I looked for ways to reduce the waste. What I found out is that raw chickens cost such a small fraction of what a cooked chicken sells for, it's worth wasting several chickens to sell each. So they end up making lots of different flavors and varieties to attract maximum customer interest. So in general, when businesses can waste something cheap in order to sell more of something expensive, they do it; whether it is chickens or bike courier jobs.

The overall benefit of using a bike instead of a car is the savings. Motor-vehicles simply waste money when they're unnecessary. Driving them around unnecessarily also creates extra maintenance and fuel costs, not to mention generating more pavement/lane demand, which costs a lot in taxes. All these costs are externalized or if everyone in the market bears their fair share, everyone just accepts the burden instead of looking for ways to reduce it.

Siu Blue Wind

prj71

This is just your opinion. Not a fact.