PAUL WRIGHT didn’t know what to expect when he showed up for his new job. For the previous few years he had earned his keep playing online poker. But he was in a relationship now and needed a stable income. With a lengthy gap in his CV, he had decided to take work where there was lots of demand: as a delivery driver for Amazon.
It was a rude awakening. One of his first shifts involved driving some 50 kilometres around the north-east of England, including through a toll system, dropping off packages as he went. “By the time you take off the £1.70 toll charge and the petrol for that huge route, it makes your hourly rate terrible,” says Wright. He was driving great distances, criss-crossing the region, yet earning less than he had from the comfort of his living room.
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The woes of workers in the gig economy have long been making headlines. What is rarely considered is the problems that deliveries create for the environment and life in cities. Vans aren’t just carrying packages and stressed drivers, they are also belching out air pollution and clogging up streets – and that affects us all.
It doesn’t have to be this way. If we are smart, we can make deliveries less painful for people like Wright, and less polluting for us all. Making more deliveries on bikes or even by delivery robots could help. Some people want to go even further and completely reinvent the way we do home delivery.
Ten or 20 years ago, many of us drove to a supermarket to do food shopping. When you needed a new skirt or shirt, you went to the high street. People only had things delivered when it was really needed, and it had been like that for decades.
Online shopping still accounts for only about a tenth of retail sales in many developed countries. But what is important is the pace of growth. In 2015, each UK household placed just over two online orders a month. Next year, the average household is predicted to .
It is the final leg of the parcel’s journey where the problems crop up, known figuratively as “the last mile”. Until this stage, many goods have taken the same route, shipped around the world on huge vessels and then driven along motorways on lorries. They then arrive at a distribution centre, normally just outside a large town, and at this point their routes diverge, splintering and slowing like a river delta, as the packages wend their way to busy residential streets and city centres.
Most deliveries are made by vans. In London alone, vans make up to 400,000 personal deliveries to offices every day. The number of kilometres driven by vans each year is soaring (see Graph). This is bad news because vans are more polluting than cars. They spit out more nitrogen oxides – poisonous gases that can reduce lung function, irritate the eyes and corrode teeth.
Route of the problem
When Wright arrived for his first shift, he was guided to a line of vehicles waiting to receive their packages. He had signed up to work with the Amazon Flex app, and he used this to sign in by scanning a QR code in the depot. Then he was given a collection of packages. When he was ready to set off, the app calculated a driving route for him. In theory, its algorithm works out the most efficient route, although that is a notoriously difficult problem to solve. Wright later learned that experienced Flex drivers use their own nous and other wayfinding apps to complete their deliveries faster.
These alternative routes can make a big difference. University and his colleagues recently studied 25 UK delivery drivers who were working on a single day. They found a pair of drivers who had delivered the same number of packages in the same areas, but one managed to shorter route and spend 35 per cent less time delivering each package on average. That suggests drivers can be more efficient. “A lot of technological advances and investment has been made on the depot side in sorting and filtration, but the pointy end of the spear – the drivers – are still doing things in much the same way,” says , who worked with Bates on the study.
The navigation systems used by Amazon, DPD, FedEx and other delivery firms are often inefficient, and many are adapted from those of haulage firms that move freight long distances, not around cities. One problem they don’t account for is that the registered address of a company might not be the place where packages need to be dropped off. A bigger annoyance is that the systems take drivers to the delivery address without factoring in the need to park. It can be more efficient for drivers to leave their vehicle in one place and deliver several items on foot, rather than finding multiple parking spots.
Seasoned drivers know all this, but thanks to the low wages, this is a job with high turnover. Part of the solution could be to make navigation systems smarter and more precise, says , who studies urban infrastructure at the University of Westminster. There are several systems that divide Earth’s surface into smaller chunks, and these could be used to direct drivers to delivery points more precisely than an address. Rather than directing a driver to pull up at an office block on a busy road with no parking, they could explicitly direct them to the nearest parking place, then plot a walking route to the office.
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Parking predicament
Bates and his colleagues have developed a system that does this, calculating delivery routes where driving and walking are accounted for. When they tested it on a case study of 144 package deliveries, they could route took by a fifth.
All this makes what may be an unreasonable assumption, however: that the parking spaces are actually available. “Parking is a pretty big issue,” says , director of the Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “If you pick a random street in Manhattan these days, you’ll probably see a UPS or FedEx truck double-parked on the road in minutes.” It’s something Wright is very familiar with. “If I parked legally, my 4 hour shift would have been 10 hours long,” he says.
A raft of start-ups is trying to alleviate this problem – for both delivery drivers and commuters – by using internet-connected sensors to provide real-time information on empty parking spaces. One example is US start-up . Its technology involves embedding a hockey-puck-sized sensor into the tarmac.
The difficulties don’t stop there. Some cities are making big moves to reduce pollution that are forcing delivery companies to rethink their methods. In April, London introduced an ultra-low emission zone (ULEZ), within which vehicles must meet strict environmental standards or pay a toll. The city of Hamburg in Germany has gone further. In May, it banned commercial vehicles from its central streets.
Delivery firm UPS decided to move its depot from outside Hamburg to much closer to the centre. This was expensive, but it meant the last-mile delivery could be handled by couriers on electric or pedal bicycles with trailers. The firm was forced into the move, but it actually turned out to be cheaper, says Winkenbach. As a result, similar schemes are now cropping up across Europe and the US. In Paris, for instance, delivery porters pick up parcels from depot on the River Seine, then deliver them by bicycle and tricycle.
Banning vehicles from cities can raise the hackles of the delivery firms. More generally, experimenting with new delivery methods is expensive for firms, which can mean they are loath to try – which in turn means nothing changes. Wise’s hope is that by conducting research on models of delivery, she can test out industry-wide changes that would be beneficial for the whole city, without any one company having to make a risky investment in unproven strategies.
One of her ideas is to introduce a courier’s courier: a single, centralised carrier that would organise deliveries for various firms in an area. That one company would be a single point of contact for city groups, removing duplication of vehicles and alleviating the fight for parking spaces. The carrier would be independent of the others, so no one firm would have a monopoly, but it would share resources. London’s already carries out some last-mile deliveries using electric vans on behalf of several companies.
More radical still would be to remove drivers from the equation entirely. Doha-based company Airlift and Dutch start-up Geeba Technologies are testing deliveries by drone in Rotterdam, while Israeli firm Flytrex is delivering packages from Icelandic e-commerce company Aha to around half of ReykjavĂk. Wider uptake will be challenging, however. “The question is: where does the drone do the delivery?” says Wise. Flytex’s drones hover outside a building, then lower the items down on a cord. That won’t work everywhere.
An easier way to get robots involved may be to have them remain on the pavement. In January, a small, six-wheeled blue and black box began trundling along streets near Amazon’s Seattle headquarters. Scout robots are currently being accompanied by a human, but the hope is they will eventually be able to deliver packages alone. FedEx has also revealed a similar-looking lidar-enabled device called the FedEx SameDay Bot that will be piloted in US cities over the coming months. Another start-up, , has been testing its robots in Washington DC for more than a year, and delivered its first package in Milton Keynes, UK, in November 2018.
These robots are electric, meaning they are potentially emissions free, and they don’t contribute to traffic congestion. There is also evidence that we would have little trouble accepting them. Researchers from Harvard University recently had a robot posing as a delivery agent for the fictional start-up Robot Grub approach a student dormitory and ask people to let them in. Sixteen out of 21 people did so, suggesting that, if anything, .
Return to sender
The problems with home delivery are compounded by one thing above all: many deliveries take more than one attempt. Drivers often arrive to drop off a parcel only to find the recipient isn’t at home. That can mean they have to take it to another depot, then it has to come back again, multiplying traffic and pollution.
That many online retailers offer to return packages for free has an effect on how we shop, too. Packages ping-pong between buyers and sellers, with many customers conditioned to over-order and return. About are sent back for refund or exchange. That figure is on a rapid upward trajectory: Europe’s second-biggest delivery company, DPD, for example, saw a doubling of the number of people who returned items between 2017 and 2018.
“Hamburg in Germany has banned all commercial vehicles from its city centre”
Finding ways to help customers avoid returns is among the biggest things we can do to stem the tide of delivery-related traffic. In fashion, where return rates are among the highest, there are options. Designers can be smarter about the sizing of their clothes, for instance. One group of academics and major UK retailers is using 3D body scanners to of 11,000 people in the US. That information is used to create more representative sizing and cuts for clothes compared with the conventional method of basing designs on one supposedly representative body model.
Ultimately, if anything is to change, consumers must change their behaviour, which is easier said than done.
“I definitely shop online,” says Wright, who knows the impact of on-demand deliveries better than most. “Do I feel guilty? I mean, a little. But it’s the bourgeois democracy and capitalistic ideology we live in,” he says. He surely has a point: no one can transform the last mile on their own. But if we all make the right changes, we might just turn this juggernaut around.
Popping to the shops
Online shopping may be growing fast, but in most Western countries there are still more people who routinely go grocery shopping in their cars. Would it be a greener choice to have their weekly shop delivered?
The short answer is: it depends. In households, someone jumps in the car and drives to a store to do their main grocery shop. The country’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) totted up all the kilometres of driving that entails, assuming they shop once a week, and calculated that it would emit 17 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. Then it two scenarios in which the groceries are delivered instead.
In the first, a company uses a fuel-efficient van and can deliver the groceries when it likes, giving it freedom to make deliveries to addresses that are close to one another at the same time. This would emit about half as much CO2 as each household driving separately to a supermarket. In the second scenario, the deliveries have to be made at times of the customers’ choosing with a less-efficient van. The EPA reckons this will produce more CO2 than individuals driving to the shop. This means that unless you are banding together with neighbours to get your shopping delivered in one go, it is probably more efficient to drive to the shops — or better yet, cycle.
You might think all that goes out of the window if your groceries are delivered by an electric vehicle, but it’s not that simple. In the UK, supermarket chain Sainsbury’s recently began trialling two electric vans for deliveries in London. The trouble is that the supermarket cannot guarantee it uses electricity generated from renewable sources.
Article amended on 10 September 2019
We corrected what oxides vans spit out
