Comment by seanmcdirmid
3 days ago
That’s not even close to how dense cities work. Even if you have street parking, it’s often saturated, this is like saying delivery drivers should just deliver in the middle of the night or something. Or really should go with small delivery drones.
Or delivery drivers should ride bikes. And larger deliveries should be scheduled around low traffic times, or else the city should reserve parking for delivery trucks.
In dense cities deliveries to front doors shouldn't be done by cars, yes. They take up too much space and cause too much inconvenience. For dense-deliveries (e.g. mail) park legally and walk some sort of cart along the sidewalk for blocks. For sparse-deliveries (e.g. food) ebikes work great. For medium density (e.g. puroloator) cargo-ebikes at least greatly increase the number of out of the way spots you can park.
Larger scale deliveries (e.g. to malls, grocery store, factories) should have a privately owned off-road, built into the structure place for trucks to park and drop things off. Though things like factories often simply don't belong in the dense part of the city.
This is pretty idealistic. What winds up happening around me is the amazon guy parks their car in the middle of the road AND also has a cart to hit multiple houses at the same time in that region. Furniture deliveries or even moving trucks can block our street for 30 minutes at a time. It is almost as bad as garbage day (ya, you aren't getting through our street on Tuesday morning if you time it wrong).
This would all be solved if we just had delivery parking spaces and got rid of on street parking for everyone else. Really, just that part is just where everything falls apart quickly. This is why traffic seems so much better in Europe (at least where I've lived, like in Switzerland), deliveries work, cars are not parked on the street except at a few very expensive parking spaces.
I was basically describing how most deliveries happen where I live. Not all, and we could do with forcing the remainder to less disruptive means, but the significant majority.
> if we just had delivery parking spaces and got rid of on street parking for everyone else.
The complaint I keep seeing is one of public subsidy. So you're suggesting we subsidize deliveries but not general parking? (To be clear I think it's all just anti-car absurdity.)
Of course merely repurposing a few spots to "commercial deliveries only" every few blocks would probably work. I've seen that done in a few places. I think it comes down to a planning and administration failure.
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I'd actually agree that they ought to deliver in the middle of the night but indeed that's just not how the world currently works. Far worse than bike lanes I've regularly seen large box trucks driven up onto particularly wide stretches of sidewalk in areas with skyscrapers. Law enforcement doesn't seem to care, presumably because how else are they supposed to get packages to where they need to be?
NYC used to (or still?) enforced strictly parking violations by delivery companies. But they did it so evenly the companies just considered it a cost of doing business, and raised their rates accordingly. Not violating the law and still being in the business wasn’t an option, so no competitor could undercut the other by following the rules and not paying the fine.
Sounds like a scenario where something other than fines should be applied. Revoke plates fleetwide, tow any delivery trucks caught on the street with a mandatory 72 hour minimum impound time, with no access to the contents of the vehicle. And so on.
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