UPS Tries Delivery Tricycles As Seattle's Traffic Doom Looms (wired.com) 95
An anonymous reader shares a report: Pushing the cargo bike across a rain-soaked parking lot at a UPS distribution center in Seattle, where the shipper showed off its newest delivery vehicle, I had a realization once the pedal assist kicked in. "Yep, this will totally work," I thought. Bike messengers have long known cycling is the fastest way to get around traffic-choked cities. More commuters are getting it too. Now UPS is giving it a shot: The 111-year-old delivery service has started moving packages around Seattle by electric tricycle, in a yearlong pilot.
The vehicle in question was designed and built by Truck Trike in Portland, Oregon. When the rider starts to pedal, human power pushes the front hub. With a thumb throttle, the rider can draw power from a pair of battery packs in the base of the trike to rear hub motors for the back two wheels, with enough juice for 12 to 18 miles of range. The extra power comes in handy because the trailer, made by Portland's Silver Eagle, can fit as many as 40 packages, or about 350 pounds worth of stuff. For UPS the move is pretty spot on, because while the Emerald City is always congested, it's less than two months from what its traffic engineers call the "period of maximum constraint."
That ominous-sounding constrained period arrives on February 4, when the Alaskan Way Viaduct elevated highway along the waterfront is torn down and the 2-mile tunnel Seattle dug to replace it comes online. Crews are finishing the ramps that connect the tunnel to surface roads, and for three weeks, the city won't have a road to get through downtown on the city's waterfront side. To dodge the traffic horror show, Seattleites are planning vacations, renting Airbnbs to stay downtown, anything to avoid driving, including working from home.
The vehicle in question was designed and built by Truck Trike in Portland, Oregon. When the rider starts to pedal, human power pushes the front hub. With a thumb throttle, the rider can draw power from a pair of battery packs in the base of the trike to rear hub motors for the back two wheels, with enough juice for 12 to 18 miles of range. The extra power comes in handy because the trailer, made by Portland's Silver Eagle, can fit as many as 40 packages, or about 350 pounds worth of stuff. For UPS the move is pretty spot on, because while the Emerald City is always congested, it's less than two months from what its traffic engineers call the "period of maximum constraint."
That ominous-sounding constrained period arrives on February 4, when the Alaskan Way Viaduct elevated highway along the waterfront is torn down and the 2-mile tunnel Seattle dug to replace it comes online. Crews are finishing the ramps that connect the tunnel to surface roads, and for three weeks, the city won't have a road to get through downtown on the city's waterfront side. To dodge the traffic horror show, Seattleites are planning vacations, renting Airbnbs to stay downtown, anything to avoid driving, including working from home.
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So instead of a big slow truck I need to give a wide berth, there's multiple, big slow tricycles I need to give an even wider berth?
There will be more of them because they can't carry as many packages. They'll expect special treatment, run stop signs and red lights, etc. just like "cyclists". When they cause a collision with a regular vehicle, scorn will by default apply to the driver of the regular vehicle because the "cyclist" is more likely to end up with injuries despite it being their fault. Such at
Re: sounds like a shitshow (Score:2)
The affected downtown Seattle area has bike lanes and separate bike stoplights. There is an existing culture wherein bikes are more commonplace that most metropolitan areas. Being very opposed to any solution without understanding the problem space is ignorant noise.
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The affected downtown Seattle area has bike lanes and separate bike stoplights. There is an existing culture wherein bikes are more commonplace that most metropolitan areas. Being very opposed to any solution without understanding the problem space is ignorant noise.
Ah yes, bike lanes, where the bikes go and run red lights and stop signs, or where they comes from when weaving into traffic on the left or onto the sidewalk on the right to get around other bikes.
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"It's dangerous, and kills people."
Citation needed. Lethal bicycle/pedestrian collisions are not a problem worth solving and bicycles are legally allowed on sidewalks in many places. Far more dangerous are bicycle/car collisions.
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Sounds a whole lot like what cars do. How dare bikes want to get around other bikes, don't they know the world is a no passing zone?
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Like everything else related to the Pacific Northwest, this sounds utterly terrible. Perhaps some hipsters should be sacrificed to improve the situation.
My questions are practical, engineering-types...will these tricycles be equipped with discarded-dope-needle-proof tires? Will they also have wide, full-coverage, flared fenders so as to not "fling poo" when they cycle through the human feces on the streets from all the homeless drug addicts?
Such a lack of important engineering specifications and technical details is shameful for a tech site!
Strat
Should have done that years ago (Score:1)
Seattle is a hilly city. The guys downtown making deliveries up and down steep hills with carts and/or handtrucks full of parcels kinds of made this inevitable...
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It's flying up them that is the problem. These are not small hills we're talking about here. Some of the sidewalks have cleats.
Bicycle yes, tricycle no. (Score:3)
Bike messengers have long known cycling is the fastest way to get around traffic-choked cities.
A bicycle can be much faster over short/medium distances in a congested city, because of their ability to trivially by-pass stationary traffic.
However, a tricycle does not have this ability, being orders of magnitude wider than a bicycle. Now add the encumbrance of a trailer - especially one of sufficient capacity to make the exercise even remotely worthwhile - and you have no chance of moving through or around stationary traffic... unless you plan on riding on the pavements ("sidewalks" as the Americans call them).
Re:Bicycle yes, tricycle no. (Score:4, Informative)
As long as they qualify to use the bicycle lanes -- which I'm pretty sure they do -- they can still pass the stopped traffic that can't use bicycle lanes. It remains to be seen how much motorists are willing to watch non-automotive traffic pass them on the right before driving in that lane themselves.
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But I don't think we need to regulate bells on bikes. That'd just be to piss the Republicans off, give them something to whine about for a few hours, lol.
Ooh, that sounds fun! Let's do that.
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If they don't have a motor they can use the bike lanes.
It looks like Seattle is currently permitting electric bicycles with power assist up to 15 MPH not only in bike lanes (where it seems they were already permitted) but also on sidewalks [curbed.com] and trails [seattletransitblog.com] . (Apparently you can also have bikes assisted up to 20 MPH, but they're not permitted on sidewalks, and you have to be 16.)
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Well, they're TRIcycles not BIcycles, so perhaps not. It also depends on whether the lanes are wide enough - some of the lanes here in the UK would not be.
Then there's the matter of where they'll park while unloading and delivering - doubt that'll be allowed in the bicycle lane - and then how quickly the thing will be stolen once unattended.
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The way such vehicles are defined, human-powered vehicles with three or fewer wheels are treated the same. A trike and a bike are legally identical. Add power assist, and they may or may not be depending on how convoluted the state's law is. Licensing requirements for power assisted cycles also vary from state to state, notably between Kentucky (where 49cc mopeds do not require licensing on either the rider OR the vehicle) and Ohio (where anything with a power assist of any kind needs a driver's license and
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Then there's the matter of where they'll park while unloading and delivering - doubt that'll be allowed in the bicycle lane
Why? That's never stopped a UPS truck before.
Re:Bicycle yes, tricycle no. (Score:5, Informative)
Unless things have changed recently, Seattle allows bicycles to ride on the sidewalks. It also has a lot of bike lanes, thanks to a previous mayor who biked himself and decided to arbitrarily take lanes away from cars. Believe me, you don't want to be driving in Seattle.
But the article has its dates and underlying assumptions wrong. The traffic nightmare up here is scheduled to start January 11, when the viaduct gets shut down - it ends on February 5, when the new tunnel is scheduled to open. The three-week closure is apparently necessary so they can finish the ramps from the old viaduct approaches into the tunnel. During that closure, all the cars which normally would use the viaduct (or the tunnel) are going to be shunted onto the already-overburdened Interstate 5 and downtown surface streets.
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Ooooh, 4 feet wide, that is indeed "orders of magnitude" wider than a bike!
Yeah, with width like that how could it possibly work on pavement? If only they made lanes that wide.
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That notwithstanding, I'm sure some would give it the good old college try.
These are UPS employees we're talking about.
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Who, shockingly, don't pay gas taxes, title taxes, parking fees, sales taxes on their vehicles, income taxes, and other amounts that they expect to go in part towards roads, public parking, and car infrastruture...
It's all just a "handout."
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Who, shockingly, don't pay gas taxes, title taxes, parking fees, sales taxes on their vehicles, income taxes, and other amounts that they expect to go in part towards roads, public parking, and car infrastruture...
Actually, you don't need title for any vehicle under $500, you don't use gasoline, a lot of places charge for parking bikes (bike lockers, bike cages), everyone pays sales taxes, WE HAVE NO STATE COUNTY OR CITY INCOME TAX, and our property taxes (which renters pay too) are what pay for roads here. Bikes aren't allowed to ride on highways, which is where the state gas tax goes.
Try again, comrade.
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What percentage are those?
What percentage are those?
Which negates the charges paid by vehicles (including the electric vehicles costing less than $500) how?
Which negates the sales taxes paid on vehicles (including the electric vehicles costing less than $500) how?
You have federal income tax and fed
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Wrong. Our roads were built for horse and wagon and bicycle and streetcar. Cars came later.
Look, there are pictures of Seattle up till World War I showing throngs of cyclists and few, if any cars. Even our Public Market (which you know as Pike Place Market) was built for exactly that. Cars came much later.
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So Seattle has not built any new roads or rebuilt and widened roads since World War I.... Good to know.
And infrastructure was purpose-built and upgraded to match. Horse and wagon and bicycle and streetcar do not require 8" thick pavements and foot plus subbases.
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a tricycle does not have this ability, being orders of magnitude wider than a bicycle
Has there been a recent, unpublished definition of what constitutes "orders of magnitude"? It used to be multiples of 10, but this usage implies that the meaning is now "a little less than x2".
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A bicycle can be much faster over short/medium distances in a congested city, because of their ability to trivially by-pass stationary traffic.
You misspelled "cut over to the sidewalk, run stop signs and red lights, and otherwise break the law with impunity because cops won't try to stop you and if you get yourself injured/killed people won't dare blame the cyclist or hold them responsible for their actions especially since their shit won't be insured or registered".
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"...people won't dare blame the cyclist ..."
LOL you do live in a fantasy world. Sober up.
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"...being orders of magnitude wider than a bicycle."
You clearly do not understand what an order of magnitude is. A car is not even one order of magnitude wider than a bicycle. It takes a double wide trailer to make that. A bicycle takes at least two feet of width, a tricycle maybe twice that.
Also, bicycles are faster around town also because they are trivial to park. Tricycles share that advantage. Fact is, you're wrong.
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Well, my thinking - such as it was, being three pints in - was that a typical bicycle tyre width is approximately 1 inch wide, and the width of this particular trike is 48 inches, making the trike approximately 1.5 orders of magnitude wider than the bike. A reasonable result based on a slightly flawed premise.
However, your contention that "a bicycle takes a least two feet of width" is clearly flawed. Have you ever watched bicycles moving through stationary or slow-moving traffic? They go through gaps much l
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Last I checked, it's very illegal for one road vehicle to pass another in the way that you're suggesting. No one's going to prosecute an individual on a bicycle, but everyone will prosecute a commercial business procedure doing the same thing for profit. Especially with cargo involved.
The real reason (Score:1)
The real reason that bike messengers get through quicker is that they mostly ignore traffic laws and signs, and take shortcuts across sidewalks and other places they are NOT supposed to be!
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Yep. Pretty much. 98% of everyone on a bike is an epic douche.. it's up to 100% when they're delivering something.
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I'm not a bike courier, but I cycle to work and this is by far the fastest way to do it. I don't do any of the things you say. In fact, my Garmin tells me that I'm only moving for ~43 mins of my 55 min of 13 mile commute across central London. Public transport is 65-90 mins. Driving is 90 mins.
If you want to talk about law breakers on the road, look no further than car drivers. Funny how they have a blind spot to their speed on the motorway or thinking it's ok to squeeze through after traffic lights ha
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Speeding on a highway is not inherently unsafe, while running a streetlight or stop sign is. Additionally, speeding actually increases the traffic capacity of a road, and speeders contribute more money in the form of fines, both of which are of benefit to the general public. You're welcome.
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In most places in the US they are "supposed to be" on sidewalks. Ignoring traffic laws is only a modest contributor and only a fraction of cyclists behave that way.
Messengers can finish a job in the time that a car would require leaving a spot and finding parking, which it may need to do twice. That why they are faster, not for any ignorant reason you imagine.
Thought you may be interested. (Score:2)
New things in their home town (Score:1)
Only fair to try something new in Seattle, it is their home town. (but they have tried it elsewhere as well.) The trikes will be less fun in the cold wet weather on the hills. Good luck.
Need to stop stealing from bike lanes (Score:3)
The major problem we have is all the wasted public space used for private car storage on our surface streets, which would be better repurposed to higher-capacity bike and transit usage.
I for one look forward to our new Amazon-controlled UPS bike overlords, provided they don't get massive subsides like the private car storage on surface streets get.
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wasted public space used for private car storage on our surface streets
Then you'd better have a word with Seattle's new policy allowing zero parking condominium and apartment development. Street parking in places like Freemont (for example) is turning into a real shit-show with all the residents chasing after fewer available parking spaces.
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Nope, that was all the suburban drivers doing park and hide in Fremont so we set up a Residential Parking Zone to stop them from doing that. Most of us don't drive to work, actually, half the parking garages in our townhouses only have bikes and kayaks in our garages now. Only n00bZ drive, and old people.
There are mostly empty parking garage structures right next to the Fremont Bridge, every time I go past them they're almost empty. Day and night. Real Seattleites bike walk skateboard or take transit.
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Love the logical self-consistency here. Only n00bZ and old people drive, which explains why Freemont needed to set up a Residential Parking Zone to ensure that all of that empty street parking stayed empty
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The parking garages are empty. Not the streets.
This is not (really) news (Score:2)
UPS has been using electric-assist tricycles for a while in Europe.
No need for the batteries (Score:3)
The extra power comes in handy because...40 packages, or about 350 pounds worth of stuff.
350 lbs requires power assistance huh? I guess UPS has never seen a guy on a bike in India deliver a package the size of a school bus on his own power.
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350 lbs requires power assistance huh? I guess UPS has never seen a guy on a bike in India deliver a package the size of a school bus on his own power.
This is America! They probably have to account for the fact that the fat American driver probably also weighs 350 pounds himself.
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Both of them.
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The extra power comes in handy because...40 packages, or about 350 pounds worth of stuff.
350 lbs requires power assistance huh? I guess UPS has never seen a guy on a bike in India deliver a package the size of a school bus on his own power.
Hills are a thing.
Motor assist is a good idea (Score:4, Informative)
350 lbs requires power assistance huh? I guess UPS has never seen a guy on a bike in India deliver a package the size of a school bus on his own power.
Hi, I live in the Seattle area and I spend a lot of time riding bikes.
Seattle is hilly. The downtown core where the packages most likely need delivery is... also hilly.
If any packages need delivery to Queen Anne Hill, that's so steep I wouldn't want to ride that even with 10 pounds of packages. If any packages need delivery to the hospitals, we literally call that area "Pill Hill", as in there is a big hill with the hospitals on it.
Wikipedia has a list of hills in Seattle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_hills_of_Seattle [wikipedia.org]
And here's an article about how the hilly streets are challenging to folks with mobility issues: https://crosscut.com/2017/02/seattles-hills-are-the-worst-heres-a-way-to-cope [crosscut.com]
The hills are sufficiently bad that there is an official city program of rights-of-way that go through skyscrapers downtown. Instead of walking up a hill you cut through a skyscraper and use their escalators. I say again this is an official thing... I spent some time working in one of the skyscrapers on one of the routes. (I haven't found anything about this online with Google searches, but I remember reading a plaque in the skyscraper where I worked listing the guaranteed hours that the escalators were open to the public as part of this program.) Of course, UPS tricycles can't use escalators and wouldn't be allowed to even if it were possible.
It is entirely appropriate to have a motor assist if we are talking about 350 pounds of packages.
Actually it wouldn't surprise me if UPS wanted to have a motor assist even in flat places (Kansas maybe?), because it won't add that much to the expense of a special delivery tricycle and the motor will provide more speed. More speed is more packages delivered and thus more money.
So your comment is +1 snarky but -2 clueless.
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Yup. You can get from 1st avenue up to 7th avenue and only have to walk up half a block of hill. I've done it many times taking the ferry from Bainbridge and attending class on 7th avenue. Escalators for the win.
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Yes, hills don't matter regarding value, they only make the difference between seriously beneficial and absolutely mandatory.
I commute by e-bike 6 days a week and 12 miles a day. Electric saves me 3 hours a week of time and costs about $6 a year, far less than the maintenance costs of the bicycle itself. Electric assist on a delivery bicycle is an absolute no-brainer anywhere, doubly so in hills.
Re:Motor assist is a good idea (Score:4, Funny)
So your comment is +1 snarky but -2 clueless.
*whooosh* Lemme teach you some math: +1 snarky x -2 clueless = +1 funny. ;-)
Seriously, if you've never seen it, look up some pictures of Indian guys loading like entire sofas and stuff onto a bicycle and peddling it [google.com]. I've been there: it's real, and it's crazy. And when people joke about cows being on the road and cars swerving into oncoming traffic to get around them -- that's real too.
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350 lbs requires power assistance huh? I guess UPS has never seen a guy on a bike in India deliver a package the size of a school bus on his own power.
We have seven hills in Seattle. Some are fairly steep, so steep that bus lines don't go up them, and our old streetcars used to have cables to pull them up.
There are limits to what even strong UPS bike riders can do.
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Six. Denny Hill was taken down because it was in the way.
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Six. Denny Hill was taken down because it was in the way.
It still lives in our hearts
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But you don't have it, do you? Bus lines now cross it, don't they.
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"comes in handy" != requires. I bet you've never seen a guy on a bike in India deliver a package the size of a school bus either.
It's not about manhood, the electricity costs far less than the delivery person's time.
Nice try though, not that you had anything remotely interesting to say.
Not Just Seattle (Score:2)
I saw one of these in Rome last month. Perfect for getting around the narrow streets and alleys there, I assumed it was just a local adaptation. I would be interested to know how long they've been in use in Italy, or elsewhere.
Japan cities trikes prevalent (Score:1)
Manual throttle? How quaint (Score:2)
Electric bikes automatically regulate motor power based on pedal power (for every W the cyclist produces, the motor produces n W). This level is adjustable in steps, but once set, no manual operation is necessary.
Thumb operation seems a crappy solution in comparison.