Umm, 10’ is 120". Suburbans are 79" wide, Federal law limits trucks to 102". All else of what you say is true, of a limited number of streets. Most are simply not that narrow. I lived in Chelsea and Tribeca for 13 years, most streets are wide enough for double parking. Look at a map, the city is a set of grids with rare exceptions like the West Village. Where it gets nasty and chaotic is where the grids intersect.
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You know what you’re right on the suburban I looked up the wrong statistic, that was length. I was moving too fast. But I’ve definitely driven a Suburban through Manhattan and hit a few roads I couldn’t physically get it into. And more than a few where getting that truck down them was both a bad idea and seriously disturbed traffic. And one notably narrow street where an overhanging stand pipe very nearly ripped the bumper off. Which was my larger point.
Yeah I said exactly that. Most of the city is a grid. Some areas have a high concentration of very weird narrow streets. And very weird narrow streets are sprinkled liberally through the whole. All of which causes a persistent problem with large vehicles moving through many areas of the city. And an increasing problem with large vehicles making increased deliveries to residential streets. Which are far more likely to be narrow and weird than major commercial through streets. And that situation has pretty much existed since the advent of modern trucking. There’s just more of it now.
Similar bits exist in most cities with chunks that date before grid systems and automobiles were the norm.
East coast cities makes sense - it’s not so much true for newer cities (that were built, did most of their growth or were extensively redeveloped post-automobile), in particular those in the West. S.F. is pretty much unique in California, as most cities here are basically LA but at a different scale. (Some cities still have downtown cores originally built before the car that haven’t been completely destroyed, but we’re usually talking about a few square blocks.) So depending on what part of the country your’e in, you end up with radically different issues. This is the problem with things like drone delivery, too - one plan doesn’t fit the whole country.
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Sure, but there are a lot of externalities that are generated by my not going to the store, too. There’s a lot to sum up here.
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Chicago had a solution at the end of the 19th century, an underground freight rail system in the Loop (downtown). It delivered goods and coal, and removed ashes and garbage. It stopped running about 1960, and became famous in 1992, by flooding the Loop, after being pierced by a piling driven into the Chicago River at Kinzie Street.
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I think they took the total amount of freight and divided by number of people. So like those long train tracks full of coal and crude oil, gasoline tankers, trucks of mail, trucks of stuff to stock walmart, etc all add up.
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Makes for a poor story on e-commerce if so.
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One word, zip lines.
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getting diesel off the road won’t fix it
what got you ‘just in time’ now is looking to get shipped too
Quite a few people drive around, even in Manhattan. It may not make sense, but they do it. The outer boroughs are mostly car country. By ‘trucks’ I was referring to SUVs as well as vans, and pickups. The streets of New York are packed with these inflated vehicles.
There are some related cultural matters the article may have failed to note. In recent years, many yokels who came into some money have moved to the big city. They cannot conceive of existing without a car, even when they have moved into a condo in Williamsburg. (Or Soho, if they’re really loaded.) Some of these people will go to stores and cafés where they can be seen, but for most of them walking, taking a taxi, or, God forbid, going by subway or bus is inconceivable. They are also the sort of people who buy a huge amount of junk, which they must either transport to their dwelling or have delivered. They then throw the junk out and buy new junk, leading to the development of a new, class of scavengers who of course also need trucks or vans to move the junk around and resell it to lesser yokels. Eventually this state of affairs will come to an end, but it may take a while for the funny money fueling it to run out.
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That’s you. As described in the article, many buildings, being multiple dwellings, receive dozens of deliveries per day.
Perhaps not flying drones.
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Considering how much the average American throws away each year… it seems right.
o_0 81 lbs? Who are these people?
I have a ton of shirts I need to throw away/give away. If I toss something, it is because it is ripped or damaged to the point no one can use it. I have Tshirts I should never wear again folded up incase I need something I don’t care gets ruined. Old socks with holes become gun cleaning rags.
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But that vehicle is almost certainly not delivering just one thing either. It’s not like the UPS driver is leaving the dispatch center just for you (unless you happen to be unusually close to the UPS driver).
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I don’t have 81lb of clothing to throw away! I’m pretty sure I’ve never had that much. Hmm, possibly if we include all my motorcycle gear, helmet and all?
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That’s what a mail service is for! (sighs). Maybe reestablish the monoply.
Yup. That’s like, half my bodyweight in clothes. I’ve never owned that many clothes at one time. I think I’m fancy these days cos I’ve got enough socks and trousers to last me a week without a wash.
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This isn´t actually too far off. There is a german company called CargoCap that has developed a similar system with small automatised carts that can hold up to two EUR-pallets with freight moving them through small tunnels with a diameter of 2 meters, but so far only an experimental track exists.
It is a pretty cool concept, but I have my doubts it will ever realized.
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