1.5M Packages a Day Bring Chaos to NYC Streets | Hacker News Reader

1.5M Packages a Day Bring Chaos to NYC Streets

nytimes.com

157 pointspseudolus208 comments

The problem isn't trucks -- obviously, it's hugely more efficient for a single truck+driver to deliver 100's of packages in a single day than for 100's of individual people to spend an hour each going to/from a store, and even worse for congestion if even more than a few are taking individual vehicles.

The problem is parking. And the solution is obvious: multiple truck-length parking spaces along each and every block, for exclusive use by delivery vehicles, car ride services waiting for pickup, and moving vans. Which, logistically, would be relatively trivial to implement -- just painted lines and signs. Street parking needs to be reprioritized for the needs of 2019, not 1950.

It's insane and irresponsible the article doesn't even suggest street-level fixes like this, and instead seems to imply that the problem is with irresponsible/unconstrained trucking/deliveries.

Most misleading quote of the article: "“What percent of your deliveries are truly urgent — 5 percent or 2 percent?” said Mr. Holguín-Veras, the Rensselaer professor."

What has urgency got to do with it? Whether my package gets delivered in 1 day or 7 days, it doesn't change the number of trucks on the road. And if it's truly urgent, then that's when I'm running to the store, not ordering a package. Sheesh.

Absolutely. And sometimes it’s not just street parking - it’s free street parking.

> Which, logistically, would be relatively trivial to implement -- just painted lines and signs. Street parking needs to be reprioritized for the needs of 2019, not 1950.

It's funny you picked that year, because the summer of 1950 is when over night on-street parking came into existence at all. Before that, all street parking was temporary. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/17/realestate/streetscapes-c...

Wasn't that exactly the point?

> Which, logistically, would be relatively trivial to implement -- just painted lines and signs.

Plus consistent enforcement, preferably automated enforcement. Enforcement of existing bus and bike lanes is a bad joke.

They would also need to do away with the Commercial Abatement Program -- except that would drive up the cost of deliveries as well.

> Most misleading quote of the article: "“What percent of your deliveries are truly urgent — 5 percent or 2 percent?” said Mr. Holguín-Veras, the Rensselaer professor."

Good call out, 80% of the outrage machine have no basis in numbers and uses erroneous logic like this.

Is that really erroneous? It seems quite reasonable to me: is every truck 100% loaded or do they have many trucks traveling now with whatever needed to go out to hit the promised deadlines? Extra time gives them the ability to improve utilization of each truck, better route scheduling, and the possibility of off-hours deliveries avoiding peak congestion times.

From what I read and observe, trucks are already basically maximally loaded to what can be delivered in a shift -- they adjust the number of trucks and their routes to fit whatever the load of packages is. The software is really good at this.

In other words, they don't send out a truck out half-full when they could wait until tomorrow to send a full truck, which seems to be what you're suggesting. They just have a truck cover twice the area so it's full.

That means more vehicle-miles where it’s taking up space and likely drivers who are less familiar as well.

My point was just that aggressive deadlines preclude options: if you live on 3rd St and I live on 4th, one truck can deliver both of our packages with only minimal increased distance but that depends on enough people ordering within the same delivery window. Otherwise you get what I see a lot, which is the same company showing up at the same houses every day of the week even if most people could have waited to improve efficiency.

I suspect the long-term strategy might be to brand it as a pollution savings bonus, transforming a longer wait from something almost everyone sees as a negative into something which many people will feel good about.

I doubt the last mile efficiency is a big factor here. I suspect that the real optimization is in the longer parts of the route. If you're shipping something a thousand miles to get to a customer it makes sense to have a few more trucks driving around a city if it means you have less planes, long haul trucks, etc.

When I order something off Amazon and choose the longer shipping times I don't usually see it getting shipped from wherever it is to a warehouse near me and held for a couple days before delivery. Instead I usually see nothing being done until near the deadline when it ships from the warehouse. Occasionally I'll see it ship from the warehouse a few days early.

Aggressive deadlines do not preclude options once you reach sufficient scale.

There's a truck that will get to your street today. If you have a rush package on that truck, it goes along with all the other rush and non rush packages from N days ago.

Less urgent deliveries could presumably be batched together, resulting in fewer trucks on the road.

They could also be done during the night.

And Amazon is also promoting the concept of a "Delivery Day", presumably to encourage batching deliveries.

...how does that decrease the volume of shipments?

It doesn't decrease the volume of shipments, but most delivery trucks aren't 100% full. So they could make fewer trips if customers were willing to tolerate delivery delays.

Do you have numbers on that? In a city like NYC I find it hard to believe that there's many delivery trucks with a suboptimal load. With the scale they're dealing with there's no reason that most trucks can't be 100% full, except for poorly written software.

Your solution is effectively corporate welfare. The free market should determine whether customers will order packages or not.

Also, you are suggesting that the government should provide an easier means for businesses to serve their customers in a way that gives them an advantage over the local businesses that pay local taxes on purchases.

The real solution is to make delivery companies pay for the congestion they cause. A fair use tax, for example. Then, using that tax revenue, you can improve traffic. The delivery companies can pass their costs on to the retailers and the retailers can pass the costs on to the customers. The customers can then decide whether they wish to pay more or shop somewhere else.

> Your solution is effectively corporate welfare.

The current state of affairs is corporate welfare too. With an added side helping of externalities imposed on other traffic.

I think you're touching on the fact that all road surfaces in NYC are a massive net wealth transfer to those who drive on them or (especially) park on them.

I agree. Either charge the full economic rate for use of the road, or turn it over to public transport, or some mix of these.

We should be phasing out roads for non-delivery traffic in urban areas anyways.

So no buses in urban areas?

Buses are just trucks that specialize in delivering people.

It's not really corporate welfare, because delivery companies are in competition and the cost savings get passed on to the consumer. It's a subsidy.

People keep repeating "savings get passed to the consumer" truism, but what is your evidence? DHL posts healthy profits, so I allege we are just padding their bottom line.

If that were false, DHL would raise prices and get even more profits.

Or create the aforementioned delivery / pickup parking and charge a fee for their use.

Gives citizens what they want, puts cost on the delivery services for their externalities, and doesn't engage in protectionism for local businesses.

> The free market should determine whether customers will order packages or not.

Right. Use of the street should be auctioned rather than given away for free. My guess is delivery companies can and would outbid people that just want to store empty vehicles, which is what we are subsidizing now.

100% this. The article is alarmist, but there are no simple solutions here. Why should NYC devote public space to guarantee access for a business model that primarily extracts wealth from the city? Maybe Amazon should lease parking spaces to stage its deliveries, at appropriate rates. It could even install equipment (e.g. mobile pallette depos) that made the delivery process more efficient.

> extracts wealth from the city

Not "provides value"?

All the GP said is that there should be parking spaces for deliveries, not that they should be free.

> Your solution is effectively corporate welfare. The free market should determine whether customers will order packages or not.

A government fair use or congestion tax on delivery vehicles, which you are proposing, isn't a free market solution.

>The real solution is to make delivery companies pay for the congestion they cause. A fair use tax, for example. Then, using that tax revenue, you can improve traffic.

Congestion charges are only going to be effective if all road users have to pay it. If you want to charge delivery trucks but not personal vehicles, you're only going to make the congestion problem worse.

This already exists in NYC, it’s the space in front of fire hydrants. It doesn’t help.

The problem is that the trucks are simply offload points, and occupy large sections of street as 5-15 people process the packages, stack delivery carts, and proceed on their way. Then the deliveries are completed on foot. It’s a multi-hour process, blocks the sidewalk, and is pretty disruptive.

Edit: you can see this process in action in the pic at the top of the article.

Ok that's not a solution because it's not legal either and doesn't fit delivery trucks. Actual loading zones are very different.

It was a slightly tongue in cheek answer, just that as a practical matter for the use case of dropping off a passenger or a lone package, they work just fine, and are commonly used for that case.

I agree that actual loading zones are different, but I don’t think they would address the actual problem on the ground.

There's already even a mechanism for what you want -- commercial-only zones (yellow curb).

One downside is they are typically all day long. A reasonable extension would be to expand them with more restrictive zones: deliveries only between 10-12 and 2-4 for most neighborhoods (there's no perfect time but a fixed window would help people plan). For neighborhoods with doormen: 4-6 AM, 7-10 pm (with a doorman, 4AM isn't a gift to package thieves). TCP cars in residential yellow curb: only 6-10 AM. etc.

Running to the store... which also got its inventory delivered by truck! So the urgency argument is even less apt.

But the number of trucks and stops they would need to make is much smaller if they're just going to stores instead of individual houses. And in NYC it's highly likely the person going to the store is taking public transit.

In NYC it's highly likely the person going to the store is walking. I've pretty much got everything I need within walking distance; there's only a very few specialized stores I'd go farther than that for (e.g. B&H).

Sure, trucks delivering packages are more efficient than people getting stuff from stores, but the former hasn't replaced the latter. People are still doing both.

You're not wrong there is some induced demand here too. Still, the best response is their suggestion, areas meant for item drop off.

I thought we were supposed to be designing cities for people and not vehicles. Isn't the answer for everyone to bike with their bike trailer to a central warehouse and collect their own packages?

I’m a heavy bike supporter, but this suggestion seems to make the lives of bikers and other people better, too.

Delivery people could ride their (electric) bikes that last oh, one mile from a central warehouse, to the drop off point.

No, service vehicles are integral to well-functioning cities. We need to increase efficient transportation so most people avoid cars with a single driver.

Delivery reduces traffic by having 1 truck drop off 100 packages instead of 100 people picking up 1 package.

carving out specific areas for specific vehicular uses is designing for people. people still need vehicles sometimes, especially communal, efficient vehicles like the ones that do parcel delivery. Everybody doing everything themselves is not a good solution, no matter what mode of transportation they use.

I am all for bikes, but this is super silly. How is it an improvement for a hundred people waste their time and clog up the streets to do the job of a single truck?

This! What an insane framing from the times. 15 odd years ago the city gradually began converting manhattan avenue parking to more and more commercial loading zones because of double parking, and it worked. But despite proof that it works and pressure from transit groups (e.g. TransAlt -- primarily bike advocacy -- pitches a loading zone on every side of every block), the city has never been willing to do this on streets or most other boroughs.

The ticket money and jobs might present a conflict of interest, or it might just be entitled car-owning lifers. But it's insane, because double parking is incredibly harmful to traffic flows, dangerous to truck drivers and cyclists, and unnecessary in a city whose residents who largely demand truck deliveries all day every day and don't need or want the free/cheap parking.

There are already many truck only zones. They typically are in effect during business hours. Swift deliveries can also be done in the 30 ft zones around fire hydrants. The drivers already ignore them and double park wherever they want, causing mayhem when there is no way to get by on narrower streets.

No, there should not be street side parking on most streets as this becomes a huge hazard for cyclists with uni students randomly swerving in and out to deliver a pizza or people carelessly swinging doors open to get out of a taxi without looking.

Inside a city, for most kinds of deliveries, it would be more efficient to have people deliver by e-bikes. A bike with a trailer or large bag is an incredibly efficient way to deliver most kinds of items since you can simply pull up to the front door of the place you want to deliver to and unload the items. Sure you still have the issue with very large items but most people aren't ordering a new bed very often at all.

Bicyclists are pretty reckless in their driving. It’s extremely rare to see one actually stop at a traffic signal and not just blow through when they have momentum.

As for package size ... I’m not sure there’s much of anything delivered to my building on a daily basis that could be transported up hill by bike.

I suggested ebikes and trailers which makes it fairly easy to move anything of up to about 40kg and smaller than a tv box. I have ridden a bike pulling a trailer of 20kg up to the top of a mountain and it was quite do able but with an ebike it would be trivial. Most packages that people order are very small items that could fit in one hand and suit this method very well.

You might be onto something here. The last delivery I received was a chair; it came unassembled but was still fairly bulky. I'd pay a small premium to watch somebody try to carry it on a bicycle because that sounds hilarious.

More seriously, most small items are shipped in packaging that's much too large. Solve that problem and non-truck delivery becomes a lot more feasible. Still not feasible for some packages though.

A chair is something you would likely still deliver by truck but most of the items I have received and seen others receive come in a small box or a bubble wrap plastic sleeve. Or they are food items. These are all ideal for delivering by bike and in my city they mostly are.

More efficient by which metric? It's going to take 30+ ebike trips to cover a full delivery truck with a lot of deadhead trips to pick up more packages. How much are you paying them? Same rates as the drivers? Good luck!

It means a lot, and no it doesn’t have much at all to do with parking.

Almost all parcel deliveries are considered urgent, if not they should be using the USPS.

Being anti-parking, but wanting to assign swaths for the exclusive use of trucks seems like a schizophrenic perspective to me.

> it's hugely more efficient for a single truck+driver to deliver 100's of packages in a single day than for 100's of individual people to spend an hour each going to/from a store

Not sure if by "efficient" you also mean it's better for the environment, but I did hear from some researcher that deliveries are ecologically much worse than going to the store. The podcast/"lecture"[1] is in Flemish (and audio/video isn't very accessible), so I'll translate the main reasons:

- Many disparate products moved to many individual homes (many to many makes for a lot of 'movements', fragmentation)

- 15-20% of people is not home during a delivery attempt (useless impact)

- Returns are equally bad (people order 8 pairs of shoes knowing they'll send 7 back)

- Different delivery companies cause even more fragmentation (driving to the same home)

Of course, you might just have meant efficiency of trucks as opposed to 2-ton cars occupied by single persons (assuming most people in NYC would do their shopping by car -- as a European, I can't imagine doing that in large cities' centres, but I do hear the USA is very car-oriented so I don't know how it is in NYC).

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRqKEK_xJvc

honestly, I think the article was secretly trying to drum up hate for big tech like Amazon.

This seems to be a good solution:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway

Just have several store with more storage space where people can go pickup their items. Delivering box to individual homes cannot be efficient.

> They racked up more than 471,000 parking violations last year...

I knew someone who owned a trucking company. They had a lawyer on retainer and every month or so they would gather all the parking tickets, go to a judge (or city official) and cut a deal to pay a fraction of the actual owed amount for all the tickets. This is because, if they did not comply, each ticket would be fought tooth and nail, and the city would be wrapped in legal red tape forever.

wow, a legal DOS.

The same happens with pharmaceutical, financial or probably all companies and people with enough money . Often it’s very expensive to prosecute them so they get let off the hook or pay a settlement. That’s how we end up with a two class society where some participants are above the law because they have money for lawyers.

I guess that kind of shit doesn't fly in authoritarian countries where the corporations fear the government instead of the other way around, as shown by all the recent China appeasement.

People could use it too if they'd just fight every traffic ticket.

There are/were some startups in this space: DoNotPay, WinIt, Off the Record, TurboAppeal. Not sure how they're doing.

https://www.vox.com/2018/4/5/17119956/parking-ticket-propert...

Or, the city could have the police put a boot on the truck tires.

It seems boots are reserved for poor people. I've only ever seen boots on run down cars in working class neighborhoods like Crown Heights or Bed Stuy.

I've seen a boot on a Lamborghini somewhere in my neighborhood. It was one of the very few cases I ever saw a Lamborghini around; most cars in my neighborhood are way less expensive.

Boots are for cars which are not worth towing. Really cheap cars are unlikely to make any money if you bring it to a towyard. A Lambo, if damaged, would cost more in incidental repair than you would get out of the owner.

This is common in NYC. The biggest violators should be paying the most, but instead, they pay the least per violation because they bargain down the fines.

Here's a pretty typical fine record for a truck that was illegally parked in the bike lane during my commute this week: https://twitter.com/CydeWeys/status/1188467550822293512 (expand all replies) And note how they're getting a reduction in fines: https://twitter.com/HowsMyDrivingNY/status/11884675886255882...

And Streetsblog has written an entire series of blog posts on it: https://nyc.streetsblog.org/category/issues-campaigns/stipul...

What are they supposed to do? There’s a difference between the letter of the law and reality.

You need deliveries and couriers to make a city work, and NYC is no different.

Problem is that only people or companies with deep pockets can violate the law that way. If you don’t have money for lawyers you have to pay the tickets.

That’s how end up with a two class society where some people are above the law.

I don't know what it's like in NY, but in my state you can take a driver safety course and cut your fees down considerably.

If taking such a driver safety course actually meant that people didn't park illegally, then it'd be a huge success, and would be well worth it. But the not parking illegally part itself would be by far the greatest reduction in fines.

That's for moving violations, not parking tickets.

For non-moving violations?

Oh no, there are plenty of loopholes. It’s actually easier for a shady operator to operate than a legit one, deep pockets or not!

Parking tickets are tagged to a car, not the owner. So when you don’t pay in NY, your registration is suspended. Guess what? Bad operators don’t register in NY! (Rental/Lease fleets are registered in Arizona and Indiana, who are “business friendly” for this reason.)

Legit companies get a type of permit that can be suspended. But your shady contract delivery people flaunt these rules and disappear/reincorporate if they get caught.

That’s why the Amazons of the world are moving away from UPS/USPS/Fedex. The contract people are the bottom rung of society and agree (out of ignorance) to take on liability that an actual business would price into their rates. (This includes stuff like making sure the brakes work on the truck or that the driver is licensed, not just parking tickets)

Some truck companies make their employees pay for the truck lease. If workers can't finish enough deliveries then not only do they not get paid, they actually make a net loss. This means there is no lower bound for wages, if you exploit your workers diligently then you can get them to pay you for the privilege of working for you because they believe they will eventually receive ownership of the truck when the lease ends but they usually get fired before that happens.

This has implications for the automation debate. Robots require electricity and need to be manufactured in the first place. This means you can't actually "exploit" robots the same way you can exploit workers who receive government support or support from relatives.

Why doesn't NY just impound the cars that haven't paid?

Deliver using bikes?

Or if it's large, send someone out on a bike, wait for a parking spot, bring in the truck.

Reserve spaces for delivery trucks, set up a system so they don't arrive at the same time.

These are all options that the city can encourage/legislate/enforce.

Advocate for dedicated commercial loading zones. They're not even doing that bare minimum.

But it's crucial to point out this simple fact, and I don't think you've quite internalized it yet: Parking illegally in safety infrastructure KILLS PEOPLE. Like, multiple people are dead every year in NYC solely because a vehicle was parked illegally. So regardless of anything else, they should not be doing that. If deliveries take longer, so be it. It's not acceptable to take other people's lives like this just to deliver some packages more quickly. The problem is as bad as it is because drivers break the law and aren't sufficiently punished for it; if they actually had to be compliant with the law, then we'd see how badly things are creaking and be forced to change things, by adding more safe loading zones.

> Parking illegally in safety infrastructure KILLS PEOPLE.

Parking illegally in safe infrastructure has the potential to kill people. But increase in parking violations doesn’t say anything about parking illegally in safety infrastructure. I’ve had my fair share of parking tickets throughout my life but those were things like parking somewhere where I didn’t have a permit (or dumber, I had a permit but the permit was partially blocked from sight) or parked somewhere for too long, and those weren’t safety related.

So, yeah, “they should not be doing that”, but the article doesn’t say “they’re doing that”. Do you have evidence that delivery trucks actually block say fire hydrants on a regular basis?

I bike the streets of NYC daily. I can tell you with absolute certainty* that delivery trucks frequently park in bike lanes (which this article talks about), which directly causes the deaths of several cyclists per year. You want their names? There's articles written every time a cyclist is run over, and often enough it's because someone was illegally parked in the bike lane and they were forced into a vehicle lane and then run down. As an interesting side note, emergency vehicles like ambulances and fire trucks will use bike lanes when necessary to bypass vehicle congestion, but of course this doesn't work when the bike lane is blocked by an illegally parked vehicle. The cyclists who happen to be in the lane can of course simply pull their bikes up onto the sidewalk to let the emergency vehicle(s) through.

* Here's an example of 5 trucks parked in the bike lane in as many blocks from one of my morning commutes earlier this week: https://twitter.com/CydeWeys/status/1187386128288174080 This is not an extreme outlier; it's typical.

So we have half a million violations and complete disregard for the law, but you are saying they are not causing safety issues? You are the one that should be bringing in evidence to support this strange position. If we assume random chance, statistics aren't on your side.

And "potential to kill people" * "millions of people" = "dead people"

After repeat offense: impound the vehicle.

In this example, they paid about 72% of the full fine -- more than I expected. ($59.5k paid, $22.7k reduced)

I was expecting "a fraction" to be 10% or 20%.

This is crazy, in 3 days they got 46 fines!

How much is a parking fine though in NYC? His average is 69.44$. I'm Canadian and my last parking ticket was 63$ CAD (47.71$ USD).

This is a great argument for making the fines increase for repeat offenders. Nothing for, say, the first 5 fines, but after that increase them by 30% for each additional fine.

This story about a delivery company that thought they were negotiating their parking tickets is hilarious:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/09/nyregion/price-of-a-parki...

In Paris, freight trucks enter the city at night and deliver packages to smaller warehouses near homes. In the morning, bikes and electric vans haul them to people’s doorsteps. Some neighborhood convenience stores and flower shops double as pickup spots for packages.

European model seems like a good one to copy here.

It will be the e d of same day delivery and that’s just fine with me.

On paper, it's a perfect system. In reality, failing businesses who want the extra income sign up to be package pickup spots, and then provide deplorable service.

Some don't respect the opening hours that were published. Some literally climb over mountains of packages. Some have no organisation. Delivery companies realised that they no longer have to attempt deliveries so automatically dump their packages in the pickup points. Most pickup points end up loathing people who comes to pick up packages: the customer hates the lack of service and resent that their package wasn't delivered, the shop resents that they have even less time for their failing business, and take this out on the package customers.

The worst part is, 90% of the time you can't control if a package goes there.

Perhaps, but that sound like a much more manageable problem to solve than what the article describes happening in NYC.

Anecdatum - a local failing newsagent (UK) is the UPS pickup point and I've not had a single problem with them. In fact I prefer picking up from them because UPS delivery times are verging on fictitious. I think it may keep the newsagent afloat and that's absolutely fine by me if I can pickup my packages from them, because they're not going to exist for much longer just selling the curious mixture of indigestion tablets, cat fancier magazines and third-rate chocolate biscuits that they do currently in their windowless hovel.

>I've not had a single problem with them

Seconded. I get a lot of packages delivered to my local convenience store, even if I'm expecting to be in on the delivery day. I find it vastly preferable to collect the parcel at my own convenience rather than wait for the knock-and-run from an impatient delivery driver.

I get a lot of smaller packages delivered to work for a similar reason. I'd rather get a notification and go pick it up than have it randomly dropped either in front of my door or in the apartment's common lobby, and wonder if it's going to grow feet and walk off before I get home.

It may be a cultural difference. Over the years, I'd had parcels delivered to about 10 different depots, and the experience was always the same.

The google reviews for the places are all the same: 1 star, never open / packages stolen / packages broken.

It's great to hear it works better in some places; on paper it's a great solution.

UPS already tried doing this a few years ago in Brooklyn,[1] but not Manhattan apparently.

I was subjected to this a few years ago.

Instead of being greeted at the end of the day with my shiny new $300 phone, they left it in a pile on the filthy floor of a local bodega three blocks away. Then, after finding it, I have to wait in line and have my ID scanned and sign for it. And I paid for overnight shipping but if I don't rush home, I have to wait until the next day.

My neighbor hated it more than I did. So, she started "stealing" her packages from the bodega. It turns out that if you don't sign for the package, they return it to the sender after a week and you get a full refund. So you can easily double dip by not signing for it and also getting a refund. And the local business is responsible for package being lost.

After two months, the local bodega stopped hosting packages, presumably because they were having to eat the cost of losing packages. Since there were no other businesses nearby willing to do this, UPS was forced to resume delivering to our building.

While this is an effective way for people to shut this kind of thing down, I'm sure it must be illegal. At least if you get caught, it is fairly deniable, since the package has your name on it. But it is probably illegal to interfere with a package being delivered.

Please do not do this. You are stealing from the merchant.

[1]: https://www.ups.com/us/en/services/e-commerce/b2c-delivery-s...

This only shows the lack of character of some New Yorkers compared to people from Paris. They resort to stealing to get what they want. It is a shame, and very difficult to create a civilized world in this situation.

Are you talking about UPS Access Points?

If so, that is definitely available in Manhattan as I’ve had packages routed to them willingly (I requested it) and unwillingly (driver was too busy to complete deliveries that day).

It started out with the access points being fairly ubiquitous and available at local bakeries, coffee shops, etc. But in recent years, it’s been scaled back to the local UPS Store locations.

But it’s definitely still a thing available in Manhattan, and I’d wager all the boroughs.

>But in recent years, it’s been scaled back to the local UPS Store locations.

Alot of it is due to UPS Stores. They are franchised. Many owners got extremely upset, betrayed and were threatening to quit because UPS was making them pay all the fees for franchising and proceed to start screwing them over by involving others for basically free.

Taking the package and claiming a refund is obviously fraud but it sounds like the business was also not properly safeguarding the packages.

Why not keep them under the counter?

No, you don't claim a refund. She showed me that her Amazon tracking number showed that the package she didn't sign for was listed as returned with no signature, and she was given a refund.

It seems like something that can easily happen by accident. I can understand why she was frustrated. After being on a crowded subway, I hated having to go into a crowded store and wait on line to get my package. But I did not agree with her knowingly exploiting this to get free stuff. I know that she told other people in our building how to do this. I don't know if this led directly to the bodega not receiving packages anymore, but I'm sure that someone had to pay for it.

I would not be surprised if these access points were a major vector for mail fraud. At this particular bodega, not just did we have to wait on line, but sometimes we'd have to wait for the clerk to deal with other customers on a different line. So I can easily see how she would have made off without signing.

I never had a choice in the matter. I think it was theoretically possible to opt out, but I would have had to make a UPS account, and even then it was not a guarantee. I personally really resented how the shipping status would be changed to something like "For your convenience, we will be delivering to an access point instead". Even on Saturdays when I was home and able to receive, they didn't even bother sometimes and would just drop it off at 7PM at the bodega. Not convenient.

Let the receiver choose the pickup point. In Denmark it's usually possible to choose the pickup point in the checkout flow when ordering. In that way I can take my business elsewhere, if I don't like service.

Same in Germany. There is usually no problem at all with picking up parcels.

At least not on the level of "package is badly damaged" or "package gets lost/stolen". There's still the issue of limited opening hours which is a hard issue for people who are working themselves during business hours.

Also, the delivery companies that are not DHL have quite sparse pickup locations, which means more time lost on commuting.

I think most kiosks and other locations that serve as pickup/drop-off spots have better hours than the delivery driver.

They tend to open at around 7:00, and close at 18:00 or 19:00, which is much easier to schedule around than a driver who might deliver between, say, 7-17.

We have the same system in Sweden and it works very well.

Delivery companies realised that they no longer have to attempt deliveries so automatically dump their packages in the pickup points.

Indeed. There's a UPS pickup point a block away from me, and when Amazon decides to deliver packages via UPS, the driver 100% consistently leaves a "missed delivery" notice without even trying to deliver the package.

When I complain, UPS is always apologetic, but nothing ever changes...

The better system is what DHL is doing with their Packstationen in Germany: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Packstation

Basically it's like a vending machine for packages. You address your parcel to one of these and the package deliverer will deposit them into a locker there. I then get a code by e-mail which I can use to open the locker whenever I get around to the Packstation. It's really nice for people who work during the day and thus have a hard time getting to the pickup shops during business hours. The only downside is that it only works for small to medium-sized packages, but those are the bulk anyway.

I've seen those in various places in the US too.

Those are all over the US, too. My apartment has Parcel Pending that couriers can put packages in.

Amazon has lockers, too.

> “What percent of your deliveries are truly urgent — 5 percent or 2 percent?” said Mr. Holguín-Veras, the Rensselaer professor. “We as customers are driving the process and to some extent creating these complications.”

As a NYC resident, it's not really a matter of urgency. Identical products are generally much cheaper online (and generally with free shipping). And it's much more convenient since the products get shipped straight to my apartment which removes the need for me to navigate poorly stocked/organized stores and then carry it back to my apartment by walking, taking the subway, or the bus.

A lot of the time, it's actually difficult to find certain goods in stores here (or to know which store to go to). Recently I've purchased: calipers, a high torque servo motor, and playing cards online. I honestly don't know where I could find calipers and motors in stores here. I've tried buying playing cards in stores, but I could not find a reasonably sized package in stores that are also in stock. I've found 6 packs of playing cards in stores, but the regular 1 or 2-packs are always out of stock. I seriously tried for two months to buy the cards in store before giving up and buying it on Amazon.

I live in Canada but have family in the US. I was visiting once and was ordering some things on Amazon. Amazon offered me coupons if I delayed shipment of items. I wish Amazon would expand this offering to other countries. I'd be happy to have packages combined into a weekly or biweekly shipment. If I need something right away I could indicate that, but for the most part I don't need things same day.

In the US, the incentive (that is offered to me) for delaying an Amazon shipment is a $1 digital credit (details quoted below). I have no use for Amazon's digital credits since I consume all of my media via YouTube, Netflix, Spotify, and the ebooks offered by local public library.

> Choose FREE Amazon Day Delivery on this order and we’ll automatically apply a $1 digital reward (applicable to select eBooks, digital music, videos, and apps) to your account once your order ships. You can use this reward by logging on to Amazon.com, or browsing your smart phone, tablet, e-reader, TV or streaming device. Find an eBook, Prime Video, Digital Music, or app from Amazon Appstore that you want to purchase and we’ll automatically apply the reward at checkout. Offer redemption requires customers to be in the U.S.

It isn't all that great in practice. At first, they were offering a dollar off music purchases (which I wasn't making). Once i moved to an area that no longer had 2 hour delivery (prime now) they started offering coupons for prime now orders... I HAD been using that on occasion, but couldn't any longer.

It's almost like it was a gimmick that they didn't really care about...

Amazon wants people to request things immediately. It's harder to do effectively, so there would be less competition.

The coupons I've seen are $1 per delayed order, and that money can only be spent on digital goods like e-books. It's not enough of an incentive for me to do it because I don't particularly want to acquire DRM-encumbered digital goods.

Those incentives are not really worth it. I'm not going to delay the delivery for days to save a dollar. If it is one extra day I might consider. I'm sure Amazon is doing experiments to determine time/value curve.

> A lot of the time, it's actually difficult to find certain goods in stores here (or to know which store to go to).

Exactly this. I want to support small local businesses and I’m happy to pay a slight premium for that (as well as being able to look at/touch the physical object that I can then immediately take home with me), but I really can’t be bothered to spend an hour or two trying to track it down. I wish brick-and-mortar shops would get together and build a platform where I can search their inventories and find the places close to me that carry the item that I already know I want. Bonus points if I can compare prices too, but I can see why they might not want that.

> A lot of the time, it's actually difficult to find certain goods in stores here

I suspect the internet has made this worse. People used to go visit several stores to find less common items, so they sold eventually. Now they give up and go online.

Last month I was moving out of an apartment in midtown. My entire block, avenue to avenue, is a no standing zone for some reason. The doorman said it was just changed a couple years ago. I rented a moving truck, parked it in a garage for $60 while I finished packing up, moved the truck to the building entrance where UPS/Fedex trucks are constantly parking, put the hazards on and loaded up the truck with my stuff as fast as possible. Still got a ticket. I am really confused as to how a law-abiding person is supposed to move out of their apartment while not getting a ticket? Especially when UPS trucks seem to have no issue standing around there for hours.

> how a law-abiding person is supposed to move out of their apartment while not getting a ticket?

You can't. Paying tickets when moving in or moving out is just part of the cost of living in midtown.

That seems like crappy policy to me. Next time I'm just going to leave the moving truck parked in the no standing zone all day instead of first paying a $60 garage fee, if I'm going to get a ticket anyway.

Carry your stuff to the parking garage. It’s slower, but depending on how much you value your time cheaper than a ticket. IMO, the larger issue is your apartment not having a loading dock, they are basically taking public space for private use.

I’ve never seen a residential building with a loading dock. Best you’re gonna do is an elevator down to the garage but that’s incredibly rare

It seems to be more common with new buildings. Intermodal shipping containers only date back to the 50’s and took a while to catch on.

My last building had a full loading dock with flat concrete floors straight to the freight elevator. My current apartment has a shelf at the right height, but the freight elevator is up a ramp, though still fine with a trolley.

Hire movers. Part of their job is to know these rules and absorb fees if they don't.

There's a clear public interest in preventing standing vehicles from blocking midtown traffic. My friends have dealt with this by sheer numbers: when one friend is moving, a dozen show up to do the quick transfer from sidewalk to truck. It's still against the rules, but fast enough that you would be unlikely to be ticketed.

UPS pays the fines in bulk at a discount. They don't care and price it into the shipping cost.

A few thoughts as a bike commuter in Manhattan who sees this first hand every day:

The congestion tax can't come soon enough (and it should have no carve-outs, certainly not for people who live here).

We need to get rid of lots of free on-street parking in the city and replace it with loading zones so that taxis/Ubers and trucks have free spaces on every block to conduct their business without blocking travel lanes or bike lanes.

The constant blocking of bike lanes by trucks and cars is super dangerous, kills multiple people per year, and when the police do enforce these infractions at all, all they can do is write up some measly tickets that the truck drivers write off as the cost of doing business since they've already accumulated hundreds of them. No joke: Here's a truck I reported in the bike lane that's closing in on a thousand tickets: https://twitter.com/Reported_NYC/status/1187381912253411328

There are two solutions to this problem, both of which should be undertaken: Bike lanes should be actually physically protected, so that vehicles cannot enter the bike lane at all. They did this on the Hudson River bikepath after a terrorist drove along it and killed six cyclists a few years ago, and they need to do it in the rest of the city too. All it takes is some jersey barriers, bollards, and/or new curbs put in.

And the second solution is make the penalties on trucks meaningful. Have the fine amounts escalate with every violation within a certain period, with no cap (so that a ticket could eventually cost tens of thousands of dollars for a particular scofflaw truck, rather than the current ignorable amount of around a hundred). And tow/confiscate trucks that have enough tickets.

And one more thing: A lot of trucks are manifestly unsafe to be in such dense cities. >=53' semi-trailers, for example, are completely banned, yet you see them routinely in the city (and cops don't ticket them). They barely have enough space to turn through a typical intersection, and the they have very high beds and wide-open wheels that can easily pull in and crush to death a pedestrian or cyclist. We should ban all unsafe trucks in the city and enforce it. The only trucks allowed should be ones with sidewalls that go nearly to the ground, to prevent anyone from being run over. These trucks already exist and are widely used in Europe where they are required; here's an example: https://www.alamy.com/stock-photo-coca-cola-delivery-truck-b...

Note that, despite trucks being a minority of vehicles on the road, they account for way more than their fair share of pedestrian and cyclist deaths, because traffic speeds here are generally pretty slow and if you get hit by a car you're likely to be thrown up and over and survive. But you can be killed by one of these trucks going at just 1 mph simply by being crushed to death. This is not theoretical; it happened earlier this year when a cyclist traveling in a bike lane was doored and was thrown underneath an adjacent truck stuck in traffic, which when it started moving crushed him to death. The large open spaces between the ground and the truck deck allowing you to get run over by the wheels is highly dangerous.

100% agreed. This is a trivially solvable problem, and the only thing standing in the way is the fact that politicians are terrified to upset the small minority of people who currently benefit from free on-street parking. We're currently giving away huge amounts of the most valuable real estate in the country, and we need to reclaim it for publicly beneficial uses including bus lanes, bike lanes, and designated loading/unloading zones.

I’m all for anything that will get bikers off the sidewalks.

You don't see too much of that in Manhattan, because the sidewalks are so crowded with pedestrians that they're terrible places to be on a bike.

But yes, in general, creating safe, protected bike lanes is an excellent way to increase safety for everyone. I've heard people complain about cyclists on the sidewalks in locations that lacked bike lanes and had speeding motor traffic, and the cyclist clearly felt unsafe riding in the road, hence the sidewalk was the least bad option. You can't be too mad at someone in that situation. It's like yelling at a pedestrian for walking on the side of the road on a road that lacks sidewalks (all too common in the suburbs). If you haven't made any accommodation for the cyclist at all (and increasingly, e-scooters, e-bikes, etc.), then don't be mad when they pick the lesser of two wrongs.

>"You don't see too much of that in Manhattan,"

Uhm ... except for almost every single food delivery person. This has been an issue for a long time now as well:

https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/city-increase-fines-del...

And more recently with electric bikes as well:

https://nyc.streetsblog.org/2019/04/19/confronted-with-facts...

Delivery cyclists tend to only use the sidewalk for part of the last block when that's the only way to get to their destination. They're definitely not using the sidewalk for the entire trip; that's way too slow. Especially not on e-bikes!

They use it for a block in each direction - coming and going. Now multiply that by the number of delivery drivers and the number of deliveries and its actually quite constant, especially below 14th st. It's most certainly not necessary as they could just easily dismount on the street in front of the building. And yes often it is e-bikes and these are now the preferred delivery bike.

Well, in my commute before I moved closer to work, I had to cross a bridge, with sidewalks on each side of the bridge. One of the sidewalk is a bike lane, so completely separated from the road; I'd walk on the other sidewalk, as many other people do as it's between a subway and a tram stop. But then nearly everyday, there would be cyclist that couldn't be arsed to take their bike lane, preferring to zigzag between pedestrians.

It’s not being given away. They pay taxes to live in the city and at 3% it’s not cheap.

I live in the city and think having a car is ridiculous in many parts but let’s remember that the citizens are paying a lot of tax.

Forcing everyone to use a garage is elitist as they run over $600/month.

Those of us who live in the city and don't own cars are paying those exact same taxes, except we don't get free parking in return for them.

It's absolutely being given away. You pay those taxes regardless of whether or not you have a car. And it's not unreasonable to expect that if people want to have a car they should pay the actual cost of doing so. Why should the rest of us subsidize those people?

That’s what collective governance is. I live in NYC. I’m sure the bulk of my taxes subsidize some form of “those people” of whom I am not a part. It’s called a community. I don’t bike and yet I support I infrastructure for bikers.

As for cars, I sympathize with many people I know who have cars and need them to reverse commute or to take care of elderly parents in the burbs etc... The rich have garages. On street parking is a pain but viable for the middle class.

Let’s admit there are two valuable sides here. It doesn’t mean we don’t ultimately weigh one claim as more worthy but let’s not be cartoonish.

Cars already have their own bike lanes: roads. Why do they also get free parking?

Also, if we want make things equitable, shouldn’t we give cars and bikes the same per-person square footage or per-person-mph square footage? Why does the fact that cars are bigger give their owners the right to more free space?

Because some people need them. Because adding $7000 per year is a straw which breaks a middle class family in the city. Because a vibrant city needs middle class families and wouldn’t work as just an enclave for the very rich, the very poor, and 20-30 year olds without family responsibilities. I’m not saying these reasons trump alternative uses for the streets but they are real.

I don’t use bike lanes or a bunch of other things but yet I pay for them. This is how taxes work.

That $600/month is roughly the land value of of the parking space. Were the parking free, you would be paying that money implicitly through higher rents.

A car in Manhattan is definitely a luxury item: space is at a premium, and single-occupant vehicles are the least efficient use of that space. If you want to use that space so wastefully, I see no reason why you shouldn't be charged the full cost of that decision.

Should we then charge money for entrance to the bike lane?

I don’t own a car but I have friends with children, others who drive ride share, and many other reasons why they need a car. They can’t afford to pay for a garage (many people live in subsidized or rent controlled places) and don’t need a bike. What should they do?

You haven't given any actual reasons why someone needs a car so badly that the government ought to subsidize their ownership of one. Having small kids is not enough--and yes, I am well acquainted with the logistics of traveling with infants and toddlers. Even needing to drive for your job isn't enough: if a car is a requisite part of the job, it's the employer's responsibility to provide materials or sufficient compensation for the employee to do it. (This is where I note that ride-sharing firms are basically relying on drivers not realizing they're insufficiently compensated for the costs of actually driving).

Why do we need bike lanes? Why should the government subsidize them? Use public transit. Bike lanes are absolutely not subsidized by the bike riding tax base. It’s a hand out.

It’s the exact same thing.

People with cars need to park them. Many people can’t afford a garage. You don’t own the street spot and have to move it daily. Many street parkers have to walk many blocks to their cars.

Regardless of why people have cars, they do. They pay sales tax on them, registration tax, and fuel tax. Not to mention parking tickets from time to time. Why should the government only allow the wealthy to have cars?

It’s thinking like this that gave way to the ridiculous EV lanes. Let the wealthy cruise through traffic to their high paying job in their 100k Tesla. Meanwhile the person in the old fuel inefficient beater has to idle in traffic, burning fuel, as they worry about being late to their second job and get fired.

Maybe we should next ban factory farming so only the wealthy can eat meat.

I sometimes say that car drivers are the most entitled class I have met, and your response here is a classic example of what I mean by that. Any attempt to take a millimeter of space away from cars is an unacceptable war on cars; any attempt to improve the transportation experience for other modes of transportation of cars is a waste of money (or worse); any attempt to actually make drivers pay their way [1] is an unacceptable tax. And should there ever be a collision between a car and anything other than a car, it can never be the driver's fault (that is what disgusts me the most).

At the end of the day, your arguments are not persuasive, because all you're really complaining about is that the transportation priority doesn't resolve around you. You're couching it as sympathy for the poor, but it's not the poor you're trying to help, it's the middle class who don't want to face the trade-offs of how to allocate space with far more demand than supply. The poor can't afford the car in the first place.

[1] Fuel taxes are far from sufficient for paying for the cost of roads. Note that, at the federal level, they haven't budged since the 90s, despite inflation and massive improvements in fuel economy. The Highway Trust Fund has been dependent on general fund transfers for well over a decade.

> At the end of the day, your arguments are not persuasive, because all you're really complaining about is that the transportation priority doesn't resolve around you.

I don't own a car. But I sympathize with people that do and many people need them for various reasons. In addition, restricting cars to the high income earners of the city is unjust.

And we all use the streets and parking spots more than we think. People need to park to deliver things to you, you may rent a car from time to time and need to park on the street, some people need cars to visit family that aren't near train lines, etc.

Streets are pointless without the ability to park your car. If that was the case then parking garages would have a monopoly and prices would increase with the demand. We need bike lanes too but keep them on some of the avenues and only the major cross streets. Ride on the street between those and if you don't feel safe doing that then walk your bike on the sidewalk when needed.

Bike lanes are not equivalent to parking spaces - they're equivalent to roads. The government certainly subsidizes the streets and avenues in the city. They would be much cheaper to maintain if more of them were restricted to being pedestrian and bicycle only, but then as usual people with cars would complain about losing their free access.

Where are people supposed to park their cars? Streets need parking spots or the streets are sort of pointless. Parking garages are too expensive for some people and in addition why should the parking garages have a monopoly on parking spaces? And with no on-street parking the cost of garages would sky rocket with demand, as if they weren't expensive enough already.

I'm not anti-bike lane but people who want to ride bikes here are a fantastically small anomaly of the city and dedicating so much space to them is absurd. Even people that don't own cars use on-street parking when we have to rent a car or have friends and family coming into town that for many reasons can't take public transit.

Build bike lanes on the main crossing streets and every other avenue and that seems like a fair compromise. If you don't feel safe riding your bike in the street when you have to, then leave the bike lane then walk your bike on the sidewalk.

It makes it dangerous for drivers too! Lane changes and merges are generally relatively dangerous, and every double-parked truck (or car) forces a spontaneous and often unexpected lane merge. Sometimes they even force driving on the wrong side of the street!

Yes, it makes it more dangerous for everyone. A big problem is when intersections are daylighted (i.e. there are no parking buffers near the intersection to provide clear sight lines for safe turning), but then people park illegally in the no parking buffers anyway. Now you as a driver or cyclist are much more likely to hit, or be hit by, something unexpected in the intersection, because you can't see it coming nearly fast enough.

As a cyclist, even greens are dangerous enough (from cars running reds or pedestrians jaywalking) that I slow way down when I come up to a green with poor visibility, because it's simply not safe to trust the green.

I suspect in the next recession, municipalities are going to grasp for revenue from fines and fees. Traffic & parking violation escalation will come easy at that point.

I’m particularly alarmed by the rental trucks being used in Manhattan for Amazon deliveries. Who is driving them, how much experience do they have, and do they care? The first thing I think about when I see one is the Oklahoma City bombing.

A: Anyone, minimal, not at all.

Motor carrier regulation and safety is a really complex topic with overlapping regulatory domains, which are exploited by irresponsible operators. The US Motor Carrier Safety administration actually has a lot of public information available on carriers.

The safest assumption is that a known, legit bus, truck, van, etc is pretty safe.

Anything that is long term rental, surplus/debrandded, shady looking or too cheap is a dangerous shitshow. Stretch limos are usually dangerous. Unlicensed or not appropriately licensed drivers are a big issue too.

I doubt that they even have CDLs, so they've done an end-run around the basic legal process required to ensure safety here. (Though, the private garbage truck drivers do have CDLs and they drive like lunatics and kill people regularly, so just having a CDL is no guarantee, but it's a start).

Agreed, the streets are dangerous for bicyclists. Is the train and walking serviceable for your commute?

No. It'd take MUCH longer. Cycling, and other micro-mobility solutions like e-scooters, really are an excellent choice for many people's commutes. We just need to take away some of the street space that's been devoted for vehicles (which don't scale properly to a city of this density anyway) in order to enable more of these commutes. And once we get a lot of vehicles off the roads and replaced with much smaller bikes and such, safety will be increased for everyone, including those doing walking commutes (which necessarily includes transit users too). The fewer large motorized vehicles on the road, the less likely you are to die in a crash.

It sounds like you are trading time for safety, you are uncomfortable with your choice, and you now wish to make your tradeoffs someone else's problem.

It's the city's responsibility (and in its best interests) to create a safe, effective transportation network that moves as many people as efficiently as possible. The better the transportation network of a city runs, the better that city will be, as less time is wasted in transit and jobs are performed more efficiently, and more taxes are paid and more businesses and people move in. It is simply physically impossible to service even a fraction of the transportation needs of New York City using full-size single-occupancy motor vehicles. The city is way too dense and there isn't nearly enough space for that many vehicles, not even if you ripped out entire blocks and laid down ten-lane highways through Manhattan. So the city must support more efficient transportation methods that can scale to the density of the city, and these include trains, buses, and last mile micro-mobility solutions like bikes, bike share, scooters, etc.

So in this context, what exactly is your argument? Are you saying that it's OK for it to be rampantly unsafe for people to use the kinds of scaleable options that are necessary to efficiently scale transportation in this city? Because I can tell you the city certainly doesn't think so, and is putting in dozens of miles of new protected bike lanes each year as part of the long-running Vision Zero initiative. And yes, we're even starting to deprioritize vehicles, as you've seen with the 14th St busway recently.

> is putting in dozens of miles of new protected bike lanes each year as part of the long-running Vision Zero initiative.

"Protected bike lanes"... aren't. Because they share intersections with motor vehicles, left-hooks and right-hooks still happen, which together constitute the majority of bicyclist-motorist collisions.

A transition to a better transportation system can't happen a few bike lanes at a time. Society will need to stop thinking in terms of millions of dollars and start thinking about billions of dollars.

I agree with you that there's much, much more we could be doing, and that we should be prioritizing the completion of a maximally-protected bike network across NYC vs the patchwork that we have now.

But we're still at least doing something, more than any other city in the US, and it's a clearly stated priority of the city government. So, in that context, and in the context of the person I was replying to, it's absurd to blame someone for taking the government at its word and using the kinds of scaleable, non-polluting, lower negative externality transportation options whose use is explicitly being encouraged by the city.

When someone chooses to bike instead of drive, that's better for everyone around them, including drivers. You aren't contributing to worsening traffic, you aren't emitting particulate pollution that messes up people's lungs, and you're much less likely to seriously harm or kill someone on a bike than in a car. What rankles me is the guy who's saying it's OK if things are set up to discourage that choice.

>"Protected bike lanes"... aren't. Because they share intersections with motor vehicles, left-hooks and right-hooks still happen, which together constitute the majority of bicyclist-motorist collisions.

Part of installing protected bike lanes should be installing arrows and bike signals so there's a separate phase to make a turn.

See 2nd Ave in Seattle:

https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6074569,-122.3372911,3a,42.9...

We have some split-phase protected bike lane intersections here in NYC (e.g. 8th Ave north of 14th St), but not nearly enough. Most protected bike lane intersections are not split-phase; we're relying on drivers seeing us and yielding to us as is required of a vehicle trying to turn across others going straight. In practice though, a lot of drivers just bully you and don't yield as required, because it's gonna hurt you a lot more than them if you collide.

> We just need to take away some of the street space that's been devoted for vehicles (which don't scale properly to a city of this density anyway

Don't get me wrong I prefer them to cars, but bikes and especially e- anything are vehicles too and are dangerous and annoying to the pedestrians who are far and away the most efficient users of space.

> And the second solution is make the penalties on trucks meaningful. Have the fine amounts escalate with every violation within a certain period, with no cap (so that a ticket could eventually cost tens of thousands of dollars for a particular scofflaw truck, rather than the current ignorable amount of around a hundred). And tow/confiscate trucks that have enough tickets.

Part of the reason these companies can get away with settling is due to the large volume of tickets they receive. In the case of a fine escalating for each ticket, I would imagine that the company would then fight each ticket in court. This could easily overwhelm the courts. This seems like a fundamentally unfixable vulnerability that has been exploited by other actors (like Scientology).

This seems to be a recurring theme here, as if a parking violation is some kind of murder/capital crime situation that requires a diligent team of prosecutors and lots of hard evidence.

Except, it's not. A parking violation is strict liability for the registered owner of the car and trivially proven by a mere photograph. Odds of beating it in court are very very small.

It has nothing to do with the odds of beating it in court. If I have 1000 tickets and opt to contest them all, good luck scheduling any other case (especially if I bring photos, testimony, etc for each case). Further, it is not "strict liability" and there are defenses that can be raised.

If you want to contest 1,000 citations from distinct incidents, the court could give you 1,000 separate dockets, appearance times, and locations.

When the tickets start to run up into the tens of thousands of dollars, it's got a twofold impact on the overwhelming nature of these tickets. First, if some of the proceeds are diverted back to the court, then the court can afford to hire more folks to deal with the paperwork. Second, when a single ticket gets to be more expensive than a day's profits, the cost/benefit analysis will shift accordingly. If lots of businesses continue breaking the law, the system funds itself -- if not, then mission accomplished.

That doesn't make any sense. One could simply implement a yearly fee for companies that accumulate a large number of traffic violations (which are checked for validity as a whole unit). This would not force companies to pay the fees for the tickets but it would force them to keep the number of tickets low. If they decide to fight the tickets then they will have to pay the yearly fine anyway and since they keep accumulating tickets they will never actually reduce their backlog to manageable levels and eventually become forced to pay the ticket to stop the yearly fine.

Every time we fail to keep companies accountable, we reinforce the belief/precedent that there is one law of the rich corporations, and another for everyone else. This is going even beyond that: a company can repeatedly break the law and threaten the city.

Why should the common man respect the law when this keeps happening? Why should he not conclude "if I can steal and get away with it, it's just payback".

The problem is, many companies would just price the tickets into the cost of delivery, the same way they already do but just more. Alternatively,a company like UPS could basically completely implode and deadlock the NYC courts by contesting every single ticket individually. They have enough money to play chicken with the city, and the city will lose almost immediately.

> Here's a truck I reported in the bike lane that's closing in on a thousand tickets

Someone else on this thread asked how they are supposed to move in or move out of their apartment without getting a ticket. I responded that they can't; it's just part of the cost of picking up or delivering things in midtown.

This truck with almost 1,000 tickets serves as pretty solid evidence that there's a standing agreement between the local government and the local businesses regarding the cost of doing business in the area. It passively-aggressively appeases the public who would roast any politicians who took away their bike lanes or parking spots while making sure there is still a market for using the public infrastructure. People can rage at the businesses who block lanes while the politicians shrug their shoulders and say, "Hey, don't blame us. We've made it illegal, and we aggressively ticket them for it!"

It's not just a monetary cost though, it's a real cost in human life that adds up throughout the year. The status quo isn't acceptable and must be changed (which you seem to agree with). The most obvious way to do so would be to get rid of free on-street parking and add in lots of loading-only zones.

In Poland we have "Paczkomaty" which are often very close to homes and people can retrieve packages in 3 seconds by waving phone to QR scanner. You can also retrieve packages in convenience stores like "Żabka" or gas stations like "Orlen".

It's interesting to see Fresh Direct figure so prominently in this because they're kind of the original two day shipping company in NYC. They've been delivering groceries to online shoppers since the early 2000s. Also their warehouse has always been inside the city in LIC, Queens. The complaints about them and their trucks with loud refrigeration units are just as old. This is from a decade ago:

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/25/nyregion/25fresh.html

It's not like these delivery issues came out of nowhere. There was plenty of time for the DOT, the state and city council to look at data, study these trends and adjust policy accordingly. But like everything else it needs to reach some crisis level before any appreciable action is undertaken.

A few days ago, in the context of first drone delivery by Google, I asked why don't we build infrastructure (pipes + automatic pods going through them) to deliver grocery-sized packages. Sounds like a literal pipe dream, but I'm not convinced the economics wouldn't work. Deliveries could take a matter of minutes and the network could be expanded at will, starting with a few neighborhood delivery spots. At a price of one or two dollars a package, for a million daily deliveries, it could make sense.

Any thoughts?

Sounds like Elon Musk's next company! He'll call it "The Small Boring Company"

It's been done... operated 1897 to 1953, replaced by auto delivery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumatic_tube_mail_in_New_Yor...

Yes, I hear that every time I mention this. It is a lazy objection: the only things vaguely similar between the pneumatic tubes of the past and the ones I'm talking about are the pipes and the pods.

Specifically, in those systems the pods were moved by compressed air: today they could just be electric and autonomous. They needed to be routed manually at intermediate stations, now they could just reach their destination automatically. Only five pods a minute could travel on those pipes, but electric drive means each pod can keep a minimum distance from the one before. There would be no need for engine rooms with air compressors spaced along the route. Etc.

Basically, you can think of it as autonomous driving on a dedicated road any without obstacles.

Banning cars on major roads and eliminating street parking would solve this overnight. Roads in dense urban areas need to be used for service vehicles only.

It's just political will standing in the way at this point. People don't want to actually solve the misery, they just want to complain about it.

City tax payers are ultimately paying the price for “2-day shipping” in the form of more congestion and pollution, and compromised safety.

Shouldn’t the companies causing these problems pay for enhancing the infrastructure (roads, parking) they use to make their $$$? I imagine it’s a much more costlier option since you have to work with the city but it should be a net positive gain (packages delivered more efficiently).

Or maybe the city should tax companies that abuse the public infrastructure? This may cause smaller companies/independent contractors to close up shop, but should increase the push towards cleaner delivery options (drone delivery?)

Albeit, this wouldn’t be a problem if people would order less from Amazon and meal ready companies (Hellofresh, blueapron ...)

They could tax them, sure. The customers would ultimately bear the cost of those taxes, but that might lead to a self-correction and cause them to order fewer deliveries, perhaps by bundling their orders together into larger deliveries.

> City tax payers are ultimately paying the price for “2-day shipping” in the form of more congestion and pollution, and compromised safety.

"2-day shipping" is only a cause if it makes people order more packages in general (which it probably does, but it's a leap that should be considered rather than automatically made). The delivery companies involved are pretty efficient at this stuff and aren't going to waste money by deploying half-empty trucks, so the delivery traffic corresponds very linearly to the average total number of packages being delivered.

> Or maybe the city should tax companies that abuse the public infrastructure?

What about taxing individuals that abuse the public infrastructure by leaving cars to constantly take up street parking? Delivery companies are certainly much, much more efficient in terms of road usage and parking space needed than somebody driving a car to go buy stuff in a shop.

> New York has sought to shift more truck deliveries to nights and weekends, when streets are emptier. About 500 companies, including pharmacies and grocery stores, deliver goods from 7 p.m. to 6 a.m., under a voluntary city program.

That program is Off-Hour Truck Delivery https://ohdnyc.com and I can't think of any easier change that would have such a salutary effect on NYC traffic. It should have been made mandatory as part of the bike and bus lane changes.

Wait till the things start buzzing around via drones by the thousands...

I'm sure someone will try to spin this positively for drone delivery: "See? We can't let those poor people suffer. We must think out of the box. I know: let's use unmanned aerial delivery. By the way, did you know my company happens to be in this business?"

I am founding a startup looking to use modern tunneling tech like horizontal directional drilling and pipe-jacking to build networks of tunnels under major cities to allow high speed "just in time" deliveries using small autonomous vehicles.

These would deliver packages, groceries and takeaway meals.

Looking for cofounders/enthusiasts - see:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19131135

at 5am, there is literally no traffic on the streets of Manhattan. There is a way to utilize the resources of the roads when there is no traffic.

FWIW, the city data portal posts parking violation data by year (~10M rows/year): https://data.cityofnewyork.us/City-Government/Parking-Violat...

I worked for a trucking company for a few weeks during two summers in college. I did Manhattan deliveries once, which meant going in the middle of the night ~9pm - ~5am and doing the deliveries to avoid spending all day in traffic.

Was definitely an interesting experience.

Literally thought this was about npm before I'd parsed the headline.

If it becomes a real problem, the comments in this thread indicate that there are feasible solutions.

However, no incipient problem that requires political action is ever solved until it becomes urgent.

When a front-page NYTs story says "CHAOS" in the title, you know there are a zillion opportunities hidden in that story. Just a heads up. :-)

It looks like an ecological disaster by reading the title.

I couldn't read the article because it asked me to "login".

Archived copy without paywall:

https://archive.is/0n6kc

I hate going to the store. Love ordering online. Besides, isn't AMZN looking at drone delivery? Of course, if that becomes the norm, we'll be seeing articles about drone congestion in the skies over Manhattan.

I feel like NYC could use the trains again for much of this

Its what the highline was for after all

So basically the Russians can order staples to a few hundred carefully chosen locations and brings Cities to a standstill. No ICBMs necessary. Good to know.

With a larger item, seems plausible.

Not really. There's only so many trucks, and they're already mostly in use anyway. You wouldn't see much more trucks on the road in this case, just them working longer hours and with larger crews per truck. It happens every holiday season.

Something like that has been done before, although it wasn't the Russians. It was a guy winning a bet [1].

> On 27 November, at five o'clock in the morning, a sweep arrived to sweep the chimneys of Mrs Tottenham's house. The maid who answered the door informed him that no sweep had been requested, and that his services were not required. A few moments later another sweep presented himself, then another, and another; twelve in all. After the last of the sweeps had been sent away, a fleet of carts carrying large deliveries of coal began to arrive, followed by a series of cakemakers delivering large wedding cakes, then doctors, lawyers, vicars and priests summoned to minister to someone in the house they had been told was dying. Fishmongers, shoemakers, and over a dozen pianos were among the next to appear, along with "six stout men bearing an organ". Dignitaries, including the Governor of the Bank of England, the Duke of York, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lord Mayor of London also arrived. The narrow streets soon became severely congested with tradesmen and onlookers. Deliveries and visits continued until the early evening, bringing a large part of London to a standstill.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berners_Street_hoax

:) That was hilarious. Hook is my new hero.

According to elitist NYT only the old rich settlers of manhattan who own multi million dollar apartments and 1000$ a month parking spot are entitled to have a car and drive in the city. Thats why they are against Uber and Lyft as well.

According to the article, much of the negative impact is being felt in poorer neighborhoods where the trucks concentrate around the storage facilities.

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