There's a crackdown in Utrecht as well: https://www.duic.nl/algemeen/utrecht-legt-flitsbezorgers-aan... (Dutch)
It does feel magic to order groceries and have them at your doorstep in 10 minutes (literally). But it's rarely useful.
It does feel magic to order groceries and have them at your doorstep in 10 minutes (literally). But it's rarely useful.
Please speak for yourself. It might not make much of a difference for you or perhaps many people, but a lot of people like me also find it to be highly convenient. When I'm tired and out of time instead of ordering an unhealthy meal from $FOODDELIVERYAPP$ I can (and very frequently do) buy something relatively healthier from such a site. Of course, the negatives need to be countered too, but their high popularity does indicate I'm unsurprisingly not alone.
Without wanting to pass judgement but as someone who experienced burnout in past positions, if you don't have the time or energy to do some form of weekly shopping (even if online) and cook some food, it feels to me that the solution is that you need to work less and rest more, rather than rely on 10 min delivery because you're mentally drained to do anything else.
That is presumably the goal of everyone in such a situation. In the meantime, it can help them get through it (I'm thinking of having a newborn here in particular, but there are also various other stressing times in an average life), though it makes me wonder if this inadvertently/indirectly supports this state of being because there is less incentive to change it back to something more healthy.
Edit: For my future reference, this comment is nonconstructive how? (Sometimes I wonder what the effect would be of showing the downvote button only after a comment has any replies at all, anything that's bad enough not to engage with should be flagged after all, but then it's very hard to measure objectively if that makes people get better feedback and use it for the better or not.)
That escalated from "I like online shopping with fast deliveries" to a needlessly antagonistic and judgemental "you are living your life totally wrong".
I love ordering stuff online and barely having to wait any time at all between clicking a button and getting it on my door step. I love how everyday shopping ceased to be a logistics problem. It's simply not possible to argue against the benefits to your everyday life of having the closest there ever was to a star trek replicator at the press of a button.
Why the attitude? It's disingenuous to infer they were stating anything other than their opinion.
This is a judgement, dismissing an idea as ‘not useful’.
It can actually be better buying online. For a normal grocery store the apples first have to go to some distributor on big pallets and wait there. Then some of the apples are sent with other goods to a grocery store with the next delivery. There they will lay up to a week in non-ideal conditions with multiple people touching them.
Online, they can be distributed almost instantly when they arrive to the customer, and in the meantime they are stored perfectly. Also less waste, since one doesn't have to ship excessive amounts that won't be sold to all the small stores, to avoid any store running out.
This doesn't apply to these smaller darkstores/instant deliveries, though, as they are basically small grocery shops with the same negatives of inefficient distribution.
You cannot touch or smell the food before you buy it. You cannot pick your own based on that, or date (it has to be OK for 1 day after delivery day according to their own rules). But anything they don't deliver, anything which was rotten or otherwise over date we just mark as such, and get our money back. And sometimes we get extra stuff we did not order, which we then just share with our neighbors at times (one of our neighbors are meat eaters not into veggie stuff and we are more or less the opposite).
I think this dark store 10 min delivery stuff makes sense if you got a very busy or limited life. Double parent full time job, new born, covid quarantine. That kind of stuff. I suppose its expensive though. That said, I believe its very valuable to respect your neighbors as much as reasonable (e.g. newborns cry, sorry! -- been there). That includes businesses in citizen zoning. Maybe it should only be legal if a real person lives there?
There's also good reasons I don't live in Amsterdam but near it. This noise stuff is one of 'em. Amsterdam is too crowdy and expensive. I am within 30 minutes in Amsterdam Central Station with public transport (not that I go given covid...)
> Of course, the negatives need to be countered too, but their high popularity does indicate I'm unsurprisingly not alone.
Popularity and demand is behind, among others, deforestation and global warming. What people want and what we can have is not always the same. I don't know if that is the case here, I am simply stating that popularity alone is not a great indicator.
It's the same with the stupid electric scooters and bikes which get dumped all over the place and clutter the streets, but those streets are usually not where those people live who use them.
(Edit: I'm not the downvoter. I don't agree but that doesn't make it a nonuseful perspective.)
Edit#2: Observing the votes on this comment, presumably from car lovers/haters, is quite interesting. Not sure it's a good sign if I wrote engaging but not generally agreeable content.
That is a general problem with the ride sharing with small transportation as well as with these stores: As long as you only reap the benefits it's less likely to see the problems associated and felt by others.
That's what we have laws for. Right now they're insufficient because the phenomenon is new and not widespread enough to urgently overhaul things for.
Just because, right now, there are problems and some people exploit the legal situation, that doesn't mean this is how it will always need to be if we are to keep small electric personal transportation devices as a concept.
Cars are way too dominant, even here in bicycle-friendly Netherlands, but these app-rental things don't change anything on that front.
Because most people still use a car for anything further than a few streets away, presumably. I'm not going to electric-scooter my way from Roermond/Weert to Eindhoven every day but I know a lot of people that drive or train-ride that distance daily (pre-pandemic).
Can't it be considered public transport as well if they're owned by a transportation company, to be used by the public, and not an individual? Right now it'll fall outside of laws that require things like accessibility for sure, but that's bound to change if this takes over as a better alternative to crowded buses.
If you have a link and/or some keywords I'd also be curious to read your source material btw!
Sure. But then you would have something that is actively managed and planned by the local municipal government (implemented by a commercial or semi-governmental public transport company). It wouldn't look like the current mess where coverage is decided exclusively on the basis of profitability, multiple companies battling for dominance in the same area, and externalities such as misuse of public space left completely unaddressed (because not technically illegal).
A proper solution that could be considered part of public transport would have rentable (e-)bicycles with fixed terminals to retrieve and return from/to. Like Citybike Wien or StadtRAD Hamburg.
> If you have a link and/or some keywords I'd also be curious to read your source material btw!
I read it in a column in NRC, the source referred to is this report by the Amsterdam municipality:
https://docplayer.nl/221773234-Tussentijdse-rapportage-deelv...
> In de open antwoorden wordt door gebruikers meerdere keren aangegeven dat het openbaar vervoer wordt gemeden vanwege besmettingsgevaar.
("In the open answers, multiple users indicate public transport is being avoided due to the contagion risk.")
So it's also partially a covid thing, but yeah I don't expect that this will be the majority. Personal transport is favored over mass transport by virtually everyone after all, everything else being equal.
Also interesting in relation to sibling comments is this part:
> Fout en hinderlijk parkeren is een vast onderwerp op de reguliere overleggen tussen gemeente en aanbieder. In de vergunnings-uitvraag is specifiek gevraagd om een klachtenafhandelingsplan. De vergunning verplicht de aanbieders om binnen een bepaalde tijd klachten af te handelen, waarbij beide aanbieders in hun klachtenafhandelingsplan hebben aangegeven dit nog sneller dan de gemeentelijke criteria te doen. In de eerste voortgangsrapportage (15 januari 2021) werd duidelijk dat dit door aanbieders is gehaald.
Loosely translated: incorrect parking is always an item on the agenda between municipalities and service providers. The permit to operate the service requires a complaint procedure to be in place and the processing speed requirements from the municipality were more than met in the first evaluation.
People seem to keep bringing this up, saying the scooters are a curse that would be eradicated from their city if it were up to them, not even considering that there could possibly be a fix for this. Well...
The problem is not that any specific moped is blocking the sidewalk for days on end, it is that there always some or several mopeds doing so — the mopeds involved vary, the problem doesn't.
Actually penalizing riders who misplace them might work, but there is no indication that the complaints procedures actually leads to these companies doing that (it is not a transparent process). They will pick out the worst offenders of course, but the people who rent these things are their paying customers; the rental companies have no economic incentive to actually punish the rider who put it there, quite the opposite!
There is a need for these services, but we also need to think about all those who are negatively impacted by this.
By placing the warehouse outside the residential area, they may increase the delivery time by 15-20 minutes. Isn't that a good enough compromise for the customers? Saving 20 minutes on grocery delivery is not worth the human cost.
That one time it was really useful.