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Comment by vanderZwan | Hacker News Reader

I don't really understand why they went with a one-size-has-to-fit-all solution here when there's such a high variety of climates and terrains in the US.

Or is the idea to start with these where appropriate and develop other vehicles for more extreme climates?

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> I don't really understand why they went with a one-size-has-to-fit-all solution here when there's such a high variety of climates and terrains in the US.

Makes logistics cheaper if you only have one model to take care of, and since these are bespoke vehicles you'll also save on costs because the factory only has to build one variation.

Dutch postal service PostNL has a wide variety of vehicles ranging from trucks to bicycles. And as far as I know, bicycles have always been a big part of the last few miles of mail delivery here.

https://www.postnl.nl/over-postnl/pers-nieuws/beeldmateriaal...

They have all these vehicles but what's actually being used in practice in the Netherlands for last mile deliveries?

I'm in the city center of a large Belgian city and 99% of my deliveries from both BPost and PostNL are still the regular white panel vans, even though both have local sorting centers.

Well, I can't find any numbers on that right now (although I'm sure they're on-line somewhere) but where my family lives in the Netherlands it's mostly bikes. One of my sister delivers mail on one too.

Perhaps the policy is different in Belgium?

It's entirely possible that Belgium is different. PostNL has also always had cars and vans, but I've also seen them use bikes of various types for as long as I can remember. Of course before the advent of cargo bikes and especially cargo e-bikes, bikes were of course mostly limited to delivering letters, but they definitely did that. Lately they've been moving to bigger and bigger cargo bikes, presumably in order to use less cars, even for larger packages.

But they also used bikes way back when they were still called PTT: https://www.transportfiets.net/2007/06/27/postfietsen-van-de... https://i.pinimg.com/474x/5c/00/9f/5c009f57703d05c367078d55e...

But on this search, I can even spot some Belgian mail deliverers on bicycles: https://www.google.com/search?q=postbode+op+fiets

I suspect that the rise of on-line shopping has also drastically increased the need for cars then

Oh definitely! Sending/receiving large packages used to be rare. Mail ordering has existed for a while, but didn't really explode to replace nearly all of retail until the rise of webshops.

And I've seen lots of discussions about whether it's wasteful to have things delivered to your door instead of buying it at a central shop, or that it's actually efficient to have a single van deliver all of that stuff instead of having everybody get in their own car to drive to the shop. I guess it depends on whether you need a car to go to the shop or not.

In any case, there's lots of experimentation with ever larger cargo bikes in order to try to keep city deliveries by bike. Still, we do get a lot of delivery vans in our street.

In Rotterdam, PostNL delivers the mail or packages that fit through the letterbox using someone on a bike (they're usually walking their bike, but that's beside the point I guess).

Packages are delivered by a PostNL guy driving a white van (or, more accurately, a subcontractor using their own rented non-PostNL branded van, but wearing a PostNL uniform)

In germany, in my smaller city, there's the usual bigger van handing out parcels but it is complemented by a fleet of smaller vehicles (e-bikes, those super small vans etc.) handing out letters and smaller packages. They probably sort it by size or something locally and distribute it onto the vehicles. The smaller vehicles visit me more often.

Given the lack of safe bike infrastructure in the U.S. I can't blame their postal service for not wanting to endanger the lives of their drivers though, so the lack of (cargo) bikes is hardly surprising.

I think a lot of it has to do with density. In the urban areas of the US mail carriers walk, lot sizes are small (8-10m) so getting on an off a bike every 30 seconds doesn't make much sense. In the rural areas it could me a mile or more between houses. They both can use the same truck, in urban areas they just park it in a central location and refill their bag as needed then drive it back to the shop when done.

I agree I was in a very very humid jungle like atmosphere near Cambodia and certain EV cars work better in this environment than others where u can adjust certain parameters so that humidity doesnt wear and tear certain components

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