In our semi-rural area all the mailboxes are at roadside, 50-200 feet from the front door.
If it won’t fit in the mailbox, the USPS takes it back and leaves a little yellow pickup slip in the box.
The next day, everyone in town who had a USPS delivery the day before gets in their indivdual fossil fuel burning vehicles and toddles off to the post office.
I’m starting to dismiss stories like these as “urban core problems” in much the same way as people dismiss other stories as “first world problems”.
My guess is that most of BB’s article curators live in urban cores, and therefore tend to generalize things which piss them off as Problems Faced By Humanity.
I think of it as car-pooling for shopping; it is probably better than the equivalent number of households making the treck to the respective big box stores.
NYC already has a system of underground tubes shuttling things around, it’s called the MTA subway system. Somehow we think it better to shuttle the people around in caverns, while freight moves around in the fresh(ish) air above. It boggles my mind why we wouldn’t have done it the other way around, convert the subways entirely to freght service, and put the people back topside. Freight traffic could run steadily around the clock, as opposed to have two giant rush hours and then nothing, so it would make a more efficient use of the service. With the trucks off the surface roads, you could make the streets a lot more bikable and walkable.
Plus, if you live without a doorman (most of us), having packages delivered to your building is a crapshoot. I’ve had a lot of packages disappear from in front of my apartment door, and if it’s too heavy, the postal service, UPS, Fedex or whoever will just leave it chilling in the lobby, where the front door lock is broken half the time. I thought Amazon locker was genius, but It doesn’t seem to have panned out. I don’t need my packages to do the last mile. I can do that, just get them within striking distance. Ideally, the nearest subway station converted into a staffed package pick-up center. Local businesses could run pickups as well in reasonably-sized vehicles on a congestion-managing schedule.
tl;dr; move only people on the streets, move only freight in the subways.
ETA: edited for clarification based on @gellfex questions below…
The future is pneumatic tubes…again.
Yeah, I had kind of figured that out. My point was that sometimes no car is used at all by me, but online orders always use a vehicle. Hence a difference in congestion potential, which is the issue.
Here in Norway that is the usual way to receive medium sized goods; basically anything that you could easily carry to your car but is too big to fit your post box will be delivered to the local supermarket or petrol station and you will get a text or an email saying it is ready to be picked up. I have often wondered why such a system isn’t used in other countries. It eliminates the worry that someone will steal your goods from your doorstep.
Is there a law on how big your mailbox can be? I’m thinking the size of a medium fridge would solve that problem.
I’m going to guess that the people with kids and tweens and teens are skewing the data for the rest of us?
I dunno… i do donate a huge bag to the sally ann each spring, but thats between MrPants and me and usually has electronics and housewares and shoes, and even then its not 80lbs. But I don’t have kids…?
I shudder to think what the junk mail form factors would be if we all had mailboxes that size.
Probably because for >95% of the front doors in Manhattan (I’m guessing here), it’s a much shorter tote from the nearest curb than it is from the nearest subway station. And, do all the subway stations have elevators?
Only 25%. It’s a really silly idea, the kind that doesn’t take into account the realities of the infrastructure or the costs involved. The transit system is designed for people (barely), and has little extra capacity. The NYTimes today has an article about the Depression Era signal system.
These kinds of “great idea” proposals really bug me, a perennial one is a footbridge across the lower Hudson, with no addressing of the cost/benefit.
Well, if we’re talking Manhattan, the place is littered with subway stops But for anyone needing truly door to door service, they can afford a last-100-yards service to fill that. I’m sure it would take 5.2 seconds for Uber, postmates, et al to offer this. I’m probably the wrong person to answer this question, though, as I’m still giddy that the brooklyn public library system will ship any book I reserve to my local branch! Not all stations have elevators (and the elevators that thee are are basically public restrooms that rarely function as elevators) BUT if you made the investment in replacing most of the winding staircases with freight elevators, I think it would be worth it.
Do you have ANY idea what a shitshow that work is? An ADA lawsuit finally forced the Port Authority to add an elevator to my local PATH station, and it’s a years long, many millions project. Even if a magic want gave every station elevators, most station do not have thousands of extra square feet for your parcel service to occupy. Or is your proposal that the subway stop carrying passengers altogether?
This one. Convert all the subway rail for freight, no more freight on the street. I don’t think this will happen, just think it would be an interesting alternative to consider (I am not an engineer or city planner, just in case the Oregon State Board of Examiners for Engineering and Land Surveying is listening…)
The advanced stages of my re-imagined NYC also ban cars from the roads, and instead requires that any drivers park their cars in parking garages on the outskirts of the city (if you must) and then either take a bus, light rail, bike or get in your electric buggy that is governed at 25mph (the city speed limit) so no one takes up more than their share of road space/wear-and-tear, and to avoid a car-safety arms race.
Do you live in NYC, or any city? The subway for people is NYC’s #1 asset. Freight is an issue, but other cities have dealt with it by banning commercial deliveries during business hours. Even that would be hard sell in NYC, never mind taking away the subways.
I’ve lived in NYC for 12 years now, and my wife is a native, but I would never claim that that precludes me from failing to grasp large-scale infrastructure issues 
I just wonder if this is primarily because it has to work around car and other traffic. is there more square footage of subway than street in NYC? If the street were designed for and dedicated to almost exclusively people moving, are there obvious reasons that it be done as efficiently?
You’re proposing creating an entire new above ground mass transit system. Have you ever taken a crosstown bus? It’s faster to walk, and not because of commercial vehicles, but because of pedestrians. It’s a crowded city, and around the world subways have proven the best, if not the cheapest, solution to mass transit.
You seem to think packages, the original topic, are the issue. It’s really everything from store inventory to construction materials, and they’re not going to arrive by handtruck from the nearest subway stop.
Yes, I’m an “engineer” and poophead who sees why ideas fail, even my own.
I’m not fond of shopping (or the drive to stores). So when I shop I make sure I don’t have to do it again for a while. That means I buy enough food for a week. More over it means if mid-week I discover I’m missing an ingredient I will typically do without it, and if I get a “powerful hunger” for something that I don’t have, I wait until next week to get it.
Or I should say that is how I use to do it before moving into a city with Prime Now and Prime Fresh.
Now I tend to shop for fewer days worth of food (it’s fresher that way!), and if I realize I’m out of an ingredient I see if there is a delivery window before I want to eat that meal. (to be honest I also know people who grocery shop every day or every other day, like themselves in a store)
So I think I’m part of the problem here. On the other side of that equation though Prime Fresh sends a shopper to a store who shops for multiple people’s orders. Then it goes to a central location where it gets broken into each persons order, and then a driver take multiple orders and drops them off. So that might result in fewer trips for someone that doesn’t order too many times in a week. Maybe. It almost definitely results in fewer trips for people that don’t change their ordering frequency.
