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Comment by adhesive_wombat | Hacker News Reader

One wonders if people who think it's wasteful to use a car to transport a single person think using a car and a person to transport a sandwich is not.

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I have no idea about SF, but in Germany all the food delivery companies are 99% bike couriers.

The picture of that car-snarl leading that article implies it's a lot of cars (lots of scooters and bikes in the UK too - I doubt the cost of fuel and keeping a roadworthy car in general, makes cars economical for it here, not to mention the need for a licence which you don't need on most small bikes).

I don't get delivery super often, but for SF, my estimate would be 80% car, 19% moped scooter, 1% bicycle.

One of the other things is that a lot of the food delivery people don't actually live in SF, so they drive from out of town and do Uber things and then go home. So that also makes it harder to support more sensible logistics.

This is the real reason for them using cars. In NYC, those delivery guys on e-bikes and scooters live within a reasonable distance (via bike or public transit) of where they’re delivering.

In urban or denser suburban areas it probably makes more sense for it to be ebikes.

But that's a function of the road/street design. If bikes are well supported then people will probably switch to bikes.

This is true. What works in Bangkok can't necessarily work in Los Angeles. It's usually American cities that lack the critical density by design for the automobile that results in an inability to support efficient local logistics.

I always thought that the places with the high local transportation costs are the cities with narrow streets and no room for parking whose growth mostly predates the automobile.

Except that doesn't preclude other forms of transportation, i.e., bicycle, motorcycle, or Vespa. Good luck reengineering the suburbs of America to discard the automobile.

There's two things going on there, actually:

1. Cars are more expensive in those places, generally, but

2. You don't need a car as much, so there's fewer cars and they're not driven as far.

In practice this tends to mean lower transportation costs in those areas, even if on paper it may look like it's more expensive because owning/operating a car there costs more.

When we moved to Munich, we ditched having a car entirely. If we still had a car and had driven it just as much as in the states, then sure it would've been more expensive. We just didn't need to do that. (As soon as we moved back to the US we got a car again of course)

Los Angeles -- at least LA proper -- is mostly okay-ish for density. Where it lacks is in street/road design, which can be updated.

There is no "proper" but a small urban core that doesn't contain the greatest part of the population for enough hours a day. It's mostly urban sprawl from shore to desert that isn't effectively reachable by bike messenger.

Not sure what you're talking about. Almost all of LA is plenty fine density-wise for biking, it's just a matter of the infrastructure being bad.

Would certainly be helpful to also upzone for mixed-use, so you could get more shops in places closer to where people live, but it's not absolutely required.

In other countries, bike messengers, motorcycles, and rikishas deliver food around the area.

In London, Pret used to semi-ghost resupply sandwiches to their tiny stores from catering-like hubs via hand carts.

Always seemed a shame to me that megacities didn't lean into Mail Rail-style[1] logistics. Arterials of goods from depots outside, feeding into local hubs within the city via light rail or narrow-gauge and then last-mile dispatch via small vehicle, bikes etc from there. So there are sort of "wellsprings" of supply throughout the city. In my factory-builder-rotted mind's eye some kind of semi-automated AS/RS kind of system shuttling small-ish containers like those that go into planes now onto and off trains.

Of all the things to wish to automate away, driving 40 tonne vehicles with notoriously poor sightlines (though they have imposed safety minimums in London[2], but not after many, many deaths), often with steering wheels on the wrong side, down urban roads seems one of the better ones.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Post_Office_Railway

[2] https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/driving/direct-vision-standard-and-...

I also wonder if transporting multiple sandwiches changes the equation, and whether the multiple sandwiches being for one person or multiple people would have an effect.

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