It’s nice to see larger outlets talking about urbanism topics and Vox has made a few videos in this area recently.

  • ntzm [he/him]@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Erm how am I meant to take my grandma to hospital and also drop off three fridges and my kids to school and then an entire building’s worth of bricks? Therefore cargo bikes will never work in any situation. I am very smart.

    • puppy@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You forgot to mention that you do this each day every day. Not a once a year or once a quarter thing.

  • buzziebee@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    For those of you getting riled up to point out how this wouldn’t work in rural Nebraska - yeah no shit!

    This video is taking about how it can be very beneficial for urban areas to use electric cargo bikes rather than vans, and how it helps everyone to remove the amount of vehicles in inner cities by providing safer ways for bikes to move around (and better for emissions too!). The parcel services in my city all have hubs where lorry’s drop off pallets, and then bike porters to take the parcels for the final mile. It works great.

    Everytime there’s a video about the benefits of bike infrastructure or public transport the online discourse gets filled with pointless bad faith drivel about how public transport or bike lanes don’t work in an area with a population density of 0.000001/km^2. No one is claiming that’s the case, and no one benefits from you pointing that out. Get a grip.

    • Oisteink@feddit.nl
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      1 year ago

      Or you could make electric cars. That would be neat and it works great outside of cities and even in hilly cities. Even during winter or scorching summers.

      • chocolatine@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Pollution is not the only issue with cars. In fact, I would argue that this is not the main one in cities. A car has negative impact on infrastructure, public space sharing, safety, etc. Electric or not.

        • Oisteink@feddit.nl
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          1 year ago

          I don’t disagree, but I think that we can remove most of that and still have electric lorries delivering goods.

          Busses, trains, trams etc instead of cars, with good parking I rural commute hubs

      • mrpants@midwest.social
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        1 year ago

        Yeah or we could be well informed on the actual issues instead. We’ll choose that rather than this stupid nonsense. Cities are not rural. Rural are not cities.

  • mrpants@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    I haven’t read the article and am here to give my ignorant opinion. This wouldn’t work ever anywhere for any reason. Thank you.

  • SuiXi3D@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Having been a driver for Amazon in the past for around a year and a half, I’ll tell you right now that these bikes wouldn’t work in a lot of places Amazon delivers. In dense urban areas? Sure, but certainly not out in the ‘burbs or rural areas.

    Package counts on those routes can top out around 500. There’s no way Amazon would purposely reduce the amount of work they lay onto one driver.

    Now that being said, if they loosened their iron grip over the drivers then I can absolutely see this happening in downtowns and some apartment complexes. Outside of really densely packed areas, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.

    Some routes have drivers going well over 100 miles in a day. No way anyone’s gonna do that on a bike. And in the middle of summer in southern cities? Forget about it. Amazon doesn’t even give drivers enough time to find a bathroom, no way they’ll allow drivers to take breaks to cool off.

  • peanuts4life@beehaw.org
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    1 year ago

    Instinctually, I don’t like this idea. I’m all for eliminating cars and roads, but delivery drivers are already vulnerable and exploited enough. I can’t imagine delivering packages for Amazon in the searing heat here in Florida while every car tried to run you off the road.

    • PerogiBoi@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      I was in Paris a couple weeks ago and literally everyone delivering things were on cargo e-bikes or e-trikes. Bikes and cars coexisted on roads but there was also a lot of dedicated bike and pedestrian roads too.

    • johnthedoe@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      I think cars should be prioritised for commercial use. It serves more people like a bus or train does to public transport. In fact a van with more parcels would eliminate more trips from individual homes to the post office by car. That said. Cars shouldn’t be the only option for delivery for sure. Depending on the city and delivery region.

      • scv@discuss.online
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        1 year ago

        Exactly, this post completely misses the point. The human in a delivery van is not even desirable. It would be great to completely automate this job. Let people enjoy their lives more instead of peeing in a bottle.

  • bionicjoey@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    These vans are a hell of a lot better than semis, which IMO should not be allowed in cities. I’d be fine with more of these vans being around if it meant we could get rid of large 18 wheelers in urban areas.

  • Freeman@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Why is noone mentioning that this video was sponsored by Delta Airlines?

    I am not saying that the content isnt good but it is somehow strange to me that an Airline of all companies is sponsoring such a video

  • michaelrose@lemmy.ml
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    1 year ago

    Outside of dense urban core there just isn’t enough packages per mile to make this even slightly sane. Outside of temperate areas this would be awful when the weather is very cold or very hot. In all areas you would have to secure the packages against trivial theft and rain further adding to the weight and decreasing maximum cargo area.

    Even in the fraction of places where this would be practicable differences in speed and cargo capacity means you would need more drivers to achieve the same results. It makes 100x more sense to to push ebikes as an alternative to commuters.

  • Moonrise2473@feddit.it
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    1 year ago

    In my city this wouldn’t work, the millisecond the delivery guy turns away his head, assholes would have stolen all the deliveries. It could be used only from point to point, not fully loaded with hundreds of small deliveries

    An armored crate would increase the weight too much for human propulsion

  • Starb3an@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    I would absolutely use one of these and my bike (except when the temp is over 100°F/38°C) if the infrastructure was there. My previous apartment was on a road with a bike lane that led to a bike path near my work so I used to take that when weather permitted.

  • ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year ago

    How can we make life even more dangerous and difficult for delivery drivers? Now they can’t even hope to escape the weather even a little. Let alone the dangers of biking in traffic. Making the excuse that we should improve bike safety does absolutely nothing to save lives now and is pretty fucking insensitive and elitist.

    • mrpants@midwest.social
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      1 year ago

      More bike infrastructure and non-car road users would make it safer for them and all of us.

      “We can’t ever do anything about how bad it is.”

      You know tons of them are already zipping around on dangerous roadways with no protection available to them right?

      • ElderWendigo@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        Who are you quoting?

        They’ve already taken dangerous jobs so clearly their lives aren’t worth considering right?

    • 𝒍𝒆𝒎𝒂𝒏𝒏@lemmy.one
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      1 year ago

      A couch would probably need a box van to deliver it lol, I don’t think you can easily fit one into a standard panel van without getting a little creative

      • Shurimal@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Have you seen Renault Master, one of the most popular work vans in Europe? Shit’s huuuge inside😉 You can fit a 3-seat coach, 2 armchairs, coffee table and a floor lamp inside, along with a 100" TV.

        • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Wait do Europeans measure tvs in inches? If so I’m so sorry about what my country has done. I swear some of us are trying to metricate.

          • Shurimal@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Due to how TV, monitor, laptop, phone and loudspeaker manufacturers specify things, most europeans operate quite freely with inches. 15" laptops are still marketed as 15" laptops here, not 38cm laptops. We just got used to it.

            Just dont start speaking to europeans about fluid ounces, bushels of wheat and other such weird things🙃

            • captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              If it makes you feel any better Americans probably are more familiar with centimeters than fluid ounces except in certain quantities. I can visualize 12, 16, or 32oz, but only be a freedom juice is sold in those quantities. Meanwhile that same product is why I can imagine 2L.

              As for bushels, I can’t even picture my state’s bushel of corn, much less an Iowa bushel of wheat and yeah I recall state and product mattering for the volume of a bushel.

              This sort of thing is part of why I’m so pro US metrication. I don’t want a 38cm laptop, I want a 40cm laptop that I hook up to my 1m tv. I want agricultural goods measured in kg at market. Metrication didn’t hold because we converted reasonable numbers in us customary to less round numbers in metric. The average American has no idea how many fluid ounces are in a 2L bottle of soda despite it being required by law to be on the label.

              And the thing is that we’re increasingly having to understand it. No us customary units work well for medication. Disaster by disaster engineers switch to metric. Baked goods are easier to make in metric because you use weight and grams are just better for it. Everyday measurements are just easier in metric because fucking hell teaspoons suck.

              But yeah sorry my country’s dumbass measurement system is an international standard for literally anything

              • yA3xAKQMbq
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                1 year ago

                As a European who knows imperial units, it’s not how it works for us, and it’s not the point.

                I can tell you approximately what a litre is the same way you can judge a gallon. By experience. By comparison. You know a “gallon of milk”, I know “a litre of milk”.

                I can tell you what a meter is, but that doesn’t give me the power to tell your height to the centimeter.

                Just today, I had to mop up a water leak. I couldn’t have told you how many litres it was until I had it in the bucket, because it was spread out on the floor.

                The point of the metric system is not that everything is tidy, that a screen is not 38 cm but 40 cm.

                The point is that I can tell you that 10 40cm screens are 4 meters. That a ton of water is 1000 kg, which is a cubic meter, which is 100x100x100 cm.

                The problem with imperial units is not the units themselves, it’s the confusing calculations you have to take because you have a different unit which is 3, 12, 16, etc times the other unit.

                How much is 16 1/3 cubic foot in inches. That is the issue at hand.

      • BirdyBoogleBop@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 year ago

        Ive moved using a LWB van. Could have probably fitted 3 couches easily 6 if I stacked em.

        A Post or car derived van can take one easily possibly 2