Whenever I make my Eleventy Billion Dollars and build a house of my own, by God it will have a pneumatic tube system. I can’t think of a practical use for such a thing, but I’m going to do my part to keep artisan tube-mongers at work.
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You are correct! This information is available. (The Bureau of Transportation Statistics) Total shipments in the United States in 2013 (from this table in Freight Facts and Figures 2015) was 18,201 million metric tonnes (1000kg = 2200lbs). The population of the United Satest in 2013 was 316.4 million. That’s 57.5 metric tons/person (or 63 US tons or short tons).
There is a table of top commodities by weight and value. The top one by weight is gravel followed by cereal grains (boring!), the top one by value is machinery, but the second by value is electronics.
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Yeah, I’ve seen proposals & prototypes for both wheeled as well as flying drones that pop out of deliver trucks. It’s somehow stranger (and cuter) when a deliver truck gives birth to a bunch of baby cars…
Yeah, it’s got to be more efficient than even driving to the mall to get a few items (and certainly more efficient than driving to multiple stores, or driving for one item). Now if we could just get rid of all the empty parking spaces…
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We use to do it the other way around and it didn’t work nearly as well.
The problem moving freight around NYC isn’t one of moving things from hub to hub as with subways. it’s a problem of moving things from pre-existing hubs (post offices, wholesalers, warehouses) to individual buildings. While increased consumer shipping to the home is a new added stress to the system. You aren’t going to see retail stores, restaraunts, and businesses adding staff and vehicles to pickup their own materials from whatever hubs you add. And the increased number of vehicles doing so would likely make the situation worse.
There are lots of ideas for using underground systems to move freight into cities but they all acknowledge the need for delivery vehicles or couriers for last mile deliveries. Otherwise you’re carving new tunnels under, and with stops at every building. That just seems wildly impractical. What remains of the old pneumatic system runs through utility conduits and tunnels now used for telephony and internet infrastructure. So we aren’t repurposing any of that. Even in its prime it was only suited for paper mail and very small packages. It was obviated decades ago by much more efficient foot and bike couriers. And the advent of phones, fax and email.
As for moving people underground? The subway is far more popular, faster, and all round more comfortable than surface transport by bus. And it’s better efficiency is why it replaced a whole host of methods of surface transit. I hardly think a return to elevated trains, trolleys, and increased busing however fancy or tech buzzy will really do better than the same improvements applied to the subway.
And it’s hardly vacant outside of rush hour. You’re talking about a system that runs 24 hour a day 7 days a week. With ridership at all hours. Congestion at peak hours spill over far less into surrounding routes, don’t push congestion nearly as deep into the route. And clear far faster than surface routes (even by foot). The rush hour/peak hours thing is more of a function of hour working schedules and business hours than some inherent feature of the land below. It’s effect on trains, roads and side walls has to do with our infrastructure being over capacity. It’s the system the vast majority of New Yorkers rely on to get from point a to point b every day. And in many cases it can get you clear across the city faster and more cheaply than more circuitous surface routes. Carving hyperloop tubes through buildings or imagining some magic new form of bus is unlikely to be as cost effective or garner better results than a proper subway redo. Your fear of caverns not withstanding.
Now many other US city’s public transit? Sure. Half that shit would be more effective as the site of a new Jamba Juice.
I have noticed more Piaggio Apes here in Munich, as a partial solution to the delivery issue, though they are mostly used in the centre of the city. On the outskirts, the bigger DHL and Hermes delivery trucks are also giving way to smaller vehicles, and I even saw an Amazon delivery bicycle.
Science Fiction idea follows:
The idea of a “smart” wheeled drone that follows the delivery guy around is one I would bet upon. If small enough, it could even follow into elevators, but I suspect it would be too big to fit through most doors, opting more for carrying a pre-loaded pallet that another robot loaded at the station and stacked in order of which residence is first on the route.
I can imagine a future where the delivery person arrives at the neighbourhood, gets off of his autonomous vehicle when the Pallet Bot does, and the truck drives off without parking to go wait at the other end of the route, where human and bot both get back on, or where the bot swaps containers for the next list of addresses. The human serves mostly as an overseer, though the bot is secretly monitoring its “master” to make sure he doesn’t steal, and the truck stays on the move because electricity is cheaper than parking.
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Yeah, the linked article says explicitly that there is scant information about the flow of good through commercial delivery services inside the city limits. UPS, Fedex, DHL et. al. don’t share statistics well with municipalities, so numbers on the issue they’re actually trying to describe are hard to come by.
But there are very few crosstown subways. The L and the 7 train are highly utilized, but other than that, taking people out of the subways isn’t necessarily going to exacerbate the crosstown problem, so I think it’s a bit of a red herring. I also question that idea that pedestrians are making the buses slow. Bus only lanes on avenues have had a great effect on bus routes, and they eliminate cars, not pedestrians. Pedestrians are definitely part of it, but car traffic + double parked trucks (exacerbating traffic) + constant construction on the roads due to incredible wear and tear from commercial traffic + pedestrians filtering around all this garbage is a chaotic scene. I’ll acknowledge that I downplayed the importance of eliminating cars, but that would be a critical step toward any kind of improvement of transit in NYC. If you take the freight out of the street, given the 25mph speedlimit, there’s absolutely no reason to allow anything heavier than a Gem Car on the streets.
I’d like to hear more about this…Unless you’re just talking about transcontinental or even interstate freight, then I’d like to go back to talking about apples, and leave oranges for another time…
Last mile is a very misleading term in this case. There isn’t a major commercial enterprise (in an area of the city dense enough to need the service I’m proposing) that is a mile from a subway hub, it really is last quarter mile at worst. The entire island of Manhattan is 13 miles long you should be able to bike that in about 45 minutes.
Agreed. I don’t think there’s any reason that current commercial shippers wouldn’t fill this gap, with a tailored solution. I highly doubt it has to be trucks. Each location is not getting a huge truck’s worth of goods. And if they are, it’s because the trucks are what is there, so they’re getting a shipment to last longer, when daily or semi-weekly deliveries could be much smaller and more targeted.
I’d argue that it would be hard to disentangle any advantages from the single fact that they circumvent car and truck traffic. If you cleared the avenues for transit of bus-sized light rail on tracks, and coordinated the “stops (a-la green light coordination)” transit could fly up and down the major arterial avenues. Cars are the plague on the city that pushed public transit underground.
Yeah, my point was that the tunnels could be used more effectively if they shipped freight. Then they could be at capacity at all hours, load balancing across the entire day. commercial deliveries schedules are much more flexible than human schedules, so you can do a lot more load balancing. Off peak, the subways run every 20 minutes, because it’s more efficient to have one driver drive a long train less often than shorter trains more often, so off peak you get mostly empty trains, with long waits.
What? There is far more road surface than subway tunnel in NYC, and there is nothing more circuitous than tying to get somewhere on the subwya unless where you are going happens to be on either end of a busy line. Thus residential areas concentrate around areas where it’s convenient to ride the train into commercial centers. If you live off these routes, you end up going way out of your way to get where you are going. Above ground, vehicles have more flexibility to move, there is far more road surface than subway tunnel, and the trains are narrow, narrower than buses on a lot of lines.
Since most of America isn’t NYC, I think this ‘problem’ is a bit overblown. Let’s see the numbers on congestion in middle America.
Well, it’s not overblown given that most of the world is trending towards urbanization. You want urban planners thinking about long-term trends, not fixing issues as they arise.
I live in a region with about 6.4 million people, and an average density of about 2200 people/SQ mile. It’s not just e-commerce changing things, but the general increase of home delivery in general, as trucks are now delivering to homes, instead of staying in more commercial areas with dedicated loading zones and the like.
Interestingly the area I am in is so urban that the problem becomes somewhat self-correcting - this area has more multi-unit buildings than single or semi-detached homes, and most of these buildings DO have loading docks (or at least areas for move-in/out, etc) that allow the drivers somewhere to park. Smaller roads with exclusively single/semi-detached homes aren’t too much of an issue here, either, as they tend to be reasonably wide.
The real issue is mixed-use roads - where you have homes that abut major throughways or high-traffic areas. A single stopped vehicle in these sorts of areas, especially during our infamous rush hour, probably causes more than 100 cars or more to have to divert out of a lane during an average parcel delivery. As most of these roads are 4-lane, a stopped vehicle represents at least a 50% reduction in road capacity in that area. This gets even worse if there’s street parking and the courier needs to double-park. It causes large swaths of the city to feel like they are in perpetual gridlock for almost the entire workday.
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So…when companies truly start using drones to buzz around and deliver packages AND people start having flying cars to buzz around and get places…then can we have a battle for the skies using nerf guns mounted to the wings!!!
Seriously…can we?!
There are two things that need to happen before I die, or else I am haunting everyone:
- Personal flight equipment of some sort, and
- A manned space colony… somewhere.
Otherwise I want a refund, damnit!
I live in an area with almost the same population and pop density. I’m on the roads at least twice a day and I’ve seen none of these problems. I agree with your point about having our urban planners work on problems before they arise. I simply disagree that deliveries are a problem. I order online quite a bit. Every time I do I’m removing a car from the roads. Since those trucks carry items for multiple deliveries, I can’t help but think each of those deliveries represent one less car out there. So, how many deliveries from one truck load? It seems for UPS that’s 200-500 per truck or to put it another way, a single truck removes 200-500 cars from the road per day. That seems like a traffic reduction to this simple poster.
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That’s positively rural compared to my city’s 17k/sq mi, and I don’t see a crisis of delivery trucks here. We even have grocery delivery like Fresh Direct. I think it and other delivery options are very attractive to urban people who find they can have a great quality of life without owning a car, never mind just driving less.
My biggest supplier of industrial goods for my business, McMaster-Carr, actually has messenger zones, areas where instead of using UPS they use a local service for the same price, so if I place my order by 11 am I get it that afternoon. What bliss.
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