Is this about cars or society and industry? Because what if they're really efficient and have wheels and run on passive energy collected from the power of the sun and processed through rare minerals dug from the earth?
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Rodney Cheng did a comedy skit on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGEAiUeiaKs
other countries deliver most things using motorbikes, it always sounded ridiculous to me to use a car to deliver food
its also expensive, if you calculate the maintenance /insurance and gas into your vehicles. thats why there isnt more deliveries services for instore shopping outside of a few.
OOP has no idea what they're talking about, in NYC too all food deliveries come by bike, and in the large majority of cases it's an ebike
Nicer in the winter to use a car. And depending on the type of service, these might otherwise be used as personal cars
Your personal car doesn't make 50 deliveries in a day though, so that equation won't work out.
To be fair, most drivers have multiple ongoing deliveries (and space for them). So it's not quite one car per burrito
Just fyi, like 99% of food delivery via gig workers in nyc is done via e-bike
Even if done in a car in areas where a e-bike isn't really feasible, they usually take several orders at at time. I think 1 car picking up and delivering 3 orders is probably slightly more efficient than each person driving to the restaurant.
It should be way more efficient considering they could do a pickup from a restaurant near their last delivery. Play the traveling salesman game decently and you'll easily beat individuals driving themselves many times over. The driver might also do a pickup job from a restaurant they like and decide to get their own food at the same time.
slightly more efficient that each person driving to the restaurant
Of course. But the correct solution here doesn't require any individuals driving.
Are you implying a solution to delivery? Or that no one should eat (in or out) at restaurants?
Walkable cities
How does that fix food delivery? Are you only supposed to order from the restaurant around the corner?
Probably my personal bias, I have 5 different places I could get food from within 15 minutes walking. Closer to 20 when taking a bike.
When I visited the US I was gobsmacked by literally everything being a 30min walk at least, even in more densely populated areas
I have 5 different places I could get food from within 15 minutes walking.
Right, not exactly a lot of variation. It only really becomes viable once you add the bike back in.
So while a walk-able city is a great idea in general, it does nothing for this particular issue.
5 places is plenty variation if you cook at home most days. And if you're eating out you can easily walk a lot more as you don't need to worry about food getting cold
In most places I've lived for the past 40 years, I could just walk to the store. I have now four to choose from, all within 10 minutes of walking, and the city center is about an hour away. Ther are also bicycles.
By having groceries, you can make food yourself, at home. You can do this many times, for each time you actually have to get groceries.
As for eating at a restaurant, collective transport ranges from obvious to absolutely necessary, depending on the population density. When my family go out to eat, it's a lot more convenient to hop on a bus or tram to the city center. It takes half the time, if you consider parking, it's cheaper, and you can have a drink or two as well. You also get to engage with each other, during transit.
In the less car-retarded world, food delivery is also easier to do with non-car methods.
In any case, and because I know the kind of responses people reply with... Please don't. I just gave you some examples and a different perspective. Americans are culturally dumb as shit when it comes to considering the obviously better alternatives, in so many different aspects, and I don't really care all that much.
Thanks for the thought out answer!
You're welcome. I want to apologize for my snarky tone. More often than not, questions on forums are not asked in good faith. Yours seems to have been.
they usually take several orders at at time
I'd like to see some stats on this. When I see uber eats workers pick up at McDonald’s the orders seem to be singular.
But my anecdotal experience is not usable data.
Sometimes you will get lucky and get a couple of orders from the same restaurant, but it's usually stop at 2 or 3 different restaurants in the same area, then deliver. Occasionally I would take a single order if the money was good, but usually if I wasn't taking 3 orders or more at once I wasn't making enough money for it to be worth it.
It may have changed now, I fortunately got out of doing it a couple of yeas ago. It's stressful and hard on your vehicle, and the companies you work for are shit. I'm not defending the gig companies as they are now, but in theory having one person deliver to multiple people isn't a bad idea.
It was always obvious that the shared delivery model would result in massive delivery fees. Store employees doing deliveries were always at least partially subsidized by sales. Going third party means another company needs to suck more profit out of each delivery.
Do delivery drivers in NYC really use cars? 🤨
No, or at least not the majority of the time. Big city deliveries are mostly bike, NYC or not
I live in nyc, it's always delivered by a 2 wheeled vehicle, with the vast majority of those being ebikes
is that a manhattan thing, or does that apply to other boroughs?
I can't speak for staten island, but it's true for the rest of the boroughs
How do they deal with large buildings? I assume if there is some kind of door man or reception they just leave it there? I assume they don’t go up elevators? Or do they?
I’m sure it depends to an extent on the buildings, I can’t say how they do it in super ritzy buildings. But when I lived in a lower middle class/working class neighborhood all the apartment buildings just had a row of buzzers at the building entrance with each apartment number on them, and each apartment had a speaker inside it that may or may not work to talk to whoever’s down there, and you go down to pick up your stuff. If you’re really unlucky they can’t hear you reply at all (either from street noise or one of the speakers not working) and you have to race down however many flights of stairs to meet them.
Edit: oh, I forgot you could also buzz them in, but they usually wouldn’t come up the stairs.
They do go up the elevator right to your apartment door. Why wouldn't they?
I might worry my bike would get stolen. Either I lock it up or I bring it up. Both of which sound kind of inconvenient.
no, most are probably motorbikes, or bicycles. in the west they have the same too. Only instore shopping is all cars.
Isn’t most delivery in NYC done by bicycle?
Hiring a whole middleman to chauffer your burrito (if you would be able to do it yourself) is unsustainable even if they walked.
Having one person deliver multiple meals to different people in a single trip sounds more sustainable than each individual person making the round trip...
The big cities in India have this thing (tiffin) where the husbands ride the trains in to work and the wives stay at home and make their lunches, which they pack into metal containers and take to the train station later in the morning. Workers gather up all the tinned meals and pack them into giant racks which then ride the trains into the cities, and other workers deliver them. It's actually pretty efficient and makes use of rail capacity which would be otherwise unused.
And despite the scale of this operation, they never - like never - make a delivery mistake.
If you "think" enough about it everything but living in cave fucking a rock is unsustainable and a result of you being too dumb to do everything yourself.
Bet you lazy bastards don't even sew your own leathers. You'd rather "trade your surplus income for goods and services."
Goddamn millennials.
How so? Do ingredients for home cooking just apperate? Should everyone live on a farm with public transit nearby?
Lol no, literally my point. Transporting food wholesale to a centralized place is sustainable and efficient.
And then how does that food get from the centralized wholesale place to your kitchen? Im not just talking out my ass, this is a heavily studied topic.
Yeah that's interesting. I wouldn't mind a food bus that drops off food house to house I'm sure that exists in some places and that's definitely more efficient. Although I'm sure right now the food is the same price and the service costs extra which wouldn't happen if it came straight from a distro idk.
I was talking about one person bringing one prepared meal for another person.
Is DoorDash etc one meal at a time? Do they really not consolidate orders? I didn’t realize…
Afaik it depends on the situation. If it's an efficient route and a driver accepts multiple orders from the same restaurant they might be able to take more than one. But in general they don't restaurant hop, and back in the day when I had friends who did Uber eats, it would have to be a choice by the person to pick up more than one order at a time, so it's one driver per restaurant per time window of accepting and order and delivering it at least. And that's probably only assuming you're in a busy city and not a slower rural area.
I only say it's unsustainable because after the food you order from the restaurant is made there are now two people in the chain for a meal for one person. That doesn't square up even before you factor in the cost.
A lot of these are delivered by bike nowadays, no?
Edit: since people keep asking without reading below, I mean specifically in NYC.
Varies. In Oslo Foodora started as bike deliveries; the cyclists unionised and got better pay and working conditions, and nooow it seems to be a lot of Romanians in beaters that don't look like they'd pass their next EU inspections, don't pay tolls or for parking, and apparently there seems to be something like trafficking going on.
In a large metropolis, yes. Unfortunately most cities in the USA are spread out so much that you almost need a car to go to the bathroom.
there's no way to make delivery worth it for small items like this, be it by foot / bike / electric scooter / carrier pigeon
Well apparently there is considering it’s a popular service. I’m not sure what you mean by this.
I doubt we'll ever get data to support this but I suspect most drivers aren't drivers for very long. A few, who are otherwise entirely unemployable, may stick it out. It sounds like a much better deal than it is, I think most people realize that after a relatively short time.
My experience with doing deliveries was the only people who had been doing it for a while were a: broke as fuck and 2, exactly the opposite of the type of person you might want handling your food.
Yeah I think from the people I've talked to, it's mostly people who do it part time as a way to make a bit of extra cash or like students who otherwise don't have time for a full time job but still need some form of income.
There's an episode on a Canadian show called Late Bloomer that tells the story of one of those bike food delivery drivers who is an international student and trying to basically survive. Good show, really fucking sad episode.
I did delivery for long term at one point (doordash). Once you reach their highest rating and learn which orders to take/deny, it is actually quite profitable. Still massively exploitative, of course, but at the time I was making $18 an hour (high for my area), and that's also factoring in breaks and commute. I had a very fuel efficient hybrid which added to the value proposition. I was broke as fuck at the time, but it wasn't the job's fault, more the fact that I only worked exactly the amount of hours I needed each month to pay for my basic necessities and rent, and spent the rest with my friends and fiancee.
How about factoring in vehicle wear, tear, insurance, and depreciation? You said "hybrid" so I'm thinking car, not bicycle. And cars are pretty damn pricy per (especially city) mile, hybrid or not. Also regular insurance policies often don't allow doing such gigs for obvious reasons.
I also don't know labor laws in the US, but here those companies got in major trouble because even ignoring the exploitative nature of the gig, they were misclassifying employment as "contract work" which allowed them to avoid paying employment taxes, days off, medical pay, insurance, etc. basically displacing all that burden on the State's social systems. That's the definition of unsustainable.
It isn't sustainable. My car takes significantly less damage per mile than a gas only car, and the gas is nearly negligible compared to the pay when you get consistent 40+ mpg. Even then, it's still not sustainable. I wouldn't recommend the job to anyone, but if someone was desperate or really set on it, then it should really only be a temporary stop-gap to something more sustainable.
I drove down doordash for a while. Trust me, every driver knows how much they're getting screwed. You'll never be more class-conscious than having 30+ interactions with people as broke as you every day, and seeing every possible angle of fellow working class jobs. You do it for one of several reasons: you want some tiny modicum of control in your life through your schedule, you desperately need the money and it's easy as fuck to get a delivery job, or you started it for one of those reasons or something similar, got good enough to be ahead of the curve, and it's now more appealing than finding something else. The last one was where I was at.
I had done the job enough that I was making $18 an hour, well above the average in my area, and despite needing to pay for gas and taxes on a 1099a, it was still more appealing to keep control and flexibility over my life than to do something else. I could take days off whenever I wanted, see friends during the week, and coordinate my schedule with my fiancee easily. You're very aware that you're getting screwed, but you choose the devil you know, as they say.
you desperately need the money and it’s easy as fuck to get a delivery job
Ding ding ding.
I don't hate myself enough to do Doordash (yet), but I'm too fucking autistic to keep any job other than rideshare.
If you don't have a fuel efficient car, I wouldn't even consider it. If you do, you need to devote a lot of time to it before it becomes at all worth it (100 orders in last 30 days, good ratings, and above 70% order acceptance rate). Once you're there, it's basically as profitable as any other service job, but with the caveat that it's entirely on you and your executive function to work enough (very boring) hours to pay the bills.
Edit: also, wear and tear on your car is gonna be worth more than the job in any job where you use your personal car for 100% of the work. I would consider any of these jobs a temporary measure.
If you don’t have a fuel efficient car, I wouldn’t even consider it.
I encountered a guy doing DoorDash in a fucking RAM truck the other day. Just couldn't believe what I was seeing.
also, wear and tear on your car
And it should be mentioned that lots of short trips are hard on cars. EVs are probably much better for this, but I would guess that most delivery drivers (who are using their own personal vehicle) aren't rolling around in EVs.
It’s popular because the companies that run it are profiting enough to keep doing it.
Is this even true? I thought most of these companies were still in the "chuck VC money into the furnace" phase.
The actually drivers, however, don't realize how much they're being screwed over.
Stop assuming stupidity because a lower monetary class.
Everyone realizes and knows this, you can't do anything about it when you're struggling to feed your family and you just need extra money.
With the tax being $8.04, the order is not that small.
Pizza delivery has been popular for several decades. Pizza is cheap but they made the numbers work. It's actually weird that it was just pizza until recently.
The cost is middlemen needing to get their cut. Half the cost here is them getting their cut. $15 to use an app one time is what is unsustainable here.

These things for college campuses are great. They take up no more space than a person and can be a huge help when one is busy or sick.
When you’re disabled and cannot leave your home, this kind of stuff becomes a lifeline.
Pneumatic tubes!
An instant burrito in every home!
rofl
NYC actually used to have a citywide system like this. It was for mail but there's no reason somebody couldn't have snuck a burrito or a rolled-up pizza into one of those cannisters.
Good news, everyone !
exactly why airport pizza has such an amazing business model, because pizza can be delivered efficiently by aircraft to places up to a couple hundred miles away without relying on non-existant roads or rail
I will order 4 or 5 meals at once and then put them in my fridge to eat over the next week.
In the EU maybe, where there's a lot of protected bike lanes and where most drivers are relatively competent (and don't carry guns).
no. they are all delivered by car, even if they say it's by bike.
bikes are too slow for be good for delivery
Gridlocked traffic or having to deal with parking can change the math on this such that bikes make sense.
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