Services like Doordash, Postmates, and Uber Eats have revolutionized food delivery. By letting you effectively hire a “private taxi for your burrito”, they enabled every local restaurant to reach customers in their own homes. Only, I’ve recently identified a hitch that these apps need to solve, post-haste. I’m going to do something usually forbidden in these pages—I’m calling for a ban on cars.
You’re probably thinking sounds crazy. The whole point of these services is that you can hire someone to go pickup your food and drive it to your door. Obviously, that involves a vehicle; it’s the whole basis for the service. Indeed, in Uber’s case, they established their food service when they realized they already had a bunch of people in cars that they could tell where to go.
Here’s the thing, though. There are places where cars should shudder to go. Places where the very environment strangles them, slowing them to a crawl and trapping them in byzantine loops of asphalt and misery. I talk, of course, of the city.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Cars are great in the suburbs. Your delivery driver can pull up to the restaurant, get out, and go grab your food. They can then place it neatly on their passenger seat, carrying the precious cargo to your door. They then park outside your house, stroll up to the door, drop your food on the porch, and walk away. Maybe if they’re old-fashioned they’ll knock and hand it to you, but COVID largely established this practice as unnecessary and even rude.
That scenario works just fine—but it falls apart in the city. I learned this to my peril today. While I live in a small house, I’m in a dense downtown area. It’s full of retail, tons of offices, and plenty of tasty restaurants. In some ways, it’s a dream—there are so many delicious food outlets to order from when I open up my phone. The hitch is that it’s virtually impossible to park at any of them.
This is typical in most city areas. If you have a car, you might be lucky to park within 300 feet of a given restaurant or retail outlet. Trying to find a viable park can take ages, which surely frustrates these delivery drivers to no end. They then have to walk some distance to the restaurant, and your food is cooling off, all the while. The problem is then replicated when they arrive at your home. If you don’t have street parking outside, good luck getting your food in a timely manner. Add on traffic snarls at dinner time and it only gets worse.
Today, I ordered from a sushi restaurant maybe half a mile from my home. Had I not been under the pump for blogs, I might have walked the distance in ten minutes. Regardless, this is a busy household, so I got delivery for myself and the gang. I ordered at 11:45 AM. The food was ready by 12:00 PM. It then took five full minutes for the driver to loop past the restaurant and find a park. A further five minutes passed as they drove a half mile to my house, and another five minutes again to loop the block three times finding zero parks before they stopped dead in the road to hand me my food.
There is actually a beautiful solution to this problem. It’s called the e-bike.
A great deal of food delivery is done in the inner city using these magnificent machines. They don’t get caught up in peak hour traffic jams; bicycles can glide right by. They’re more nimble, much more able to U-turn and dip and weave to take more direct routes to their target. Plus, you can “park” them anywhere.
When I typically order sushi here, it takes a mere 2 minutes to arrive from the restaurant. It’s fresher than it would be if I walked it home from the place myself. That’s because nine times out of ten, it comes by e-bike, and everyone is happier. Still, every so often, Uber Eats designates a full-sized car to haul my Japanese luncheon through the inner city, and we all suffer the consequences.
The solution is simple. All downtown food deliveries are to be handled by e-bike. Make the change today, and be my sushi’s salvation. Please. For all of us.
Image credits: DoorDash, Capwiuejooh CC BY-SA 4.0
This delivery situation has already been figured out ages ago.
I lived outside Tokyo in the early 90’s
Ramen and Sushi and Pizza and all other sorts of deliveries were done on mopeds.
The Ramen ones were the coolest because the bowls of soup were loaded into carriers which were suspended from a pole mounted to the bike so it would sway in balance to not spill.
And if you’ve ever been to Bangkok, with it’s massive traffic – you’d know that hailing a moped makes short trips across town even faster than a tuk-tuk, which is itself faster than a taxi.
My personal favorite place to ban motorized vehicles?
Rocky and treacherous off-road trails on public lands.
You wanna go see that outcropping or cross that ridge?
Get on a bike – or even better – Get out and walk.
I have a e-bike, it folds up to fit in the trunk of my car and I take it on the commuter train into the city center. I can be anywhere in Downtown LA in 15 minutes regardless of traffic and not have to worry about finding or paying for parking.
Last time I was in Singapore delivery bikes were *everywhere* and it seems like it would make a ton of sense in that setting, at least logistically. I live deep in the ‘burbs and I’m not sure it would work so well here.
Bikes take the variability out of a trip. On my commute, the car trip is 20 minutes +/- 30 minutes based on traffic. So I have to leave 40 minutes to get to work, and accept that once a month I’ll be late.
On a bike the commute is 35 minutes +/- 90 seconds for the variability of light timing. Rain? 38 minutes. High winds? 40 minutes. Snow? 45 minutes. I check the weather the night before and adjust accordingly.
Sure, the car moves faster. But door to door time for the car is higher because I have to account for so much variability.
“Regular bikes are good too! But they’re not as fast”
That Door dash model is seriously cruizin’ for a bruizin’. Riding a bike with a giant, heavy backpack like that not only makes the setup as akward and top heavy as possible it also ensures that when you fall land with not only your weight but the weight of that backpack too. That’s a fast ticket to the ER. Good thing Door Dash offers its riders great health insurance.
They DO insure their employees, right? RIGHT?!
Ann Arbor Michigan closes down a stretch of Main street every summer for walking and outdoor sitting. I really wish that they’d go ahead and make it a permanent walking zone and allow pop ups to expand in the center or something. There is enough parking nearby with a massive garage to both the north and south of the area. So I get the sentiment. There should be walking areas, transportation areas, and fun driving areas 😉
Hot take here. Door Dash is evil, particularly when used used for the delivery of a $5.99 burrito. It is an absolute waste of time and fuel. And the only reason we have it is that our sloth overpowers any base logic we may have in our glitchy primate brains.
I’m going to argue that it’s not a waste of time and fuel if the alternative is picking it up yourself. One Door Dash driver can make multiple pickups and multiple deliveries, without having to go back and forth, ultimately saving fuel and time.
No arguments against these services being evil, though. They really prey on both restaurants and delivery drivers.
Do they though, or do they sit and idle outside the restaurant waiting for someone to put in an order, and then deliver that one order? Because that seems to be what happens in my experience.
Honestly, I’d be a little pissed if I were the second person in line for a multi-stop delivery because my food would probably be cold.
I’m afraid that paying for a cab ride for a hamburger means you get what you get. Sure, limit such deliveries to rental e-bikes only, if it helps make paying for a cab ride for a hamburger makes sense to you. Once I saw the prices that Door Dash et.al. get for such deliveries, it hasn’t made sense to me once.
I wonder how well those e-bikes would work in 6 inches of wet, heavy snow.
I mean, without chains or off-road tires I don’t foresee many cars doing well in that, either.
I drove my 2wd pickup without chains or off-road tires to work this morning in 6 inches of wet, heavy snow. It was fine.
Or rain, or cold without snow, or heat or high humidity. As a delivery driver, I can tell you I want to be in an enclosed vehicle with climate control.
A bike gets lots of airflow. Even though you’re pedaling hard it can feel cooler on a bike than sitting in a delivery van baking in the sun against a sticky seat. Unless your van has cooled seats, I’ll take the bike in most conditions.
My hybrid runs the AC even if the engine is stopped. Plus in my area the humidity is very high, so the cooling breeze isn’t nearly as comforting as you might think.
For instance I went to the nearby Outer Banks for some four-wheeling, and took the ferry to Ocracoke Island. On the way back as I was getting on the ferry the captain approached me and ask if I could put two bikes in the bed of my pickup and drive the two cyclists back to their campground. I said sure, they threw their bikes in the back and in no time they were was asleep back there.
When the ferry arrived back on Hatteras Island, they woke up and we talked a bit as I drove them back to their base. Turns out they were avid cyclists from the Tahoe region of CA, and regularly did long rides in the surrounding mountains. They figured a 50 miler with 2 ferry rides would be no problem here. What they didn’t count on was the humidity here. 90+ degrees was no problem where they were from, but 90+ with 50-60% humidity is soul sucking. They thanked me profusely for the ride. I’ll note it’s even worse a bit inland where I am because there isn’t a sea-breeze here, and the temps are usually a bit higher than at the beach, but the humidity is still here.
Acoustic bike commuter in a northern Midwest city here— bikes work fine in snow. Great, even. I have a mountain bike ready to go for snowy days: 1.75” tire with studs on the front and a 2.35” knobby on the back. Studs keep the front wheel steering on ice and the knobby tire drives through the snow.
For safety’s sake I don’t break 12mph in snowy conditions. Snow adds ~10minutes to my 35-minute, 7.5 mile commute.
I love biking in snow. It’s great. Cold and snow just require nice gear, like bar mitts and a ski visor, and then biking can be really pleasant. Rain sucks. Manageable, but it sucks.
In snow and sheet ice I commute by MTB on studded ice tyres. With the right clothes it’s fun.
Headfullofair
7 hours ago
Reply to Anonymous Person
Acoustic bike commuter in a northern Midwest city here— bikes work fine in snow. Great, even. I have a mountain bike ready to go for snowy days: 1.75” tire with studs on the front and a 2.35” knobby on the back. Studs keep the front wheel steering on ice and the knobby tire drives through the snow.
For safety’s sake I don’t break 12mph in snowy conditions. Snow adds ~10minutes to my 35-minute, 7.5 mile commute.
I love biking in snow. It’s great. Cold and snow just require nice gear, like bar mitts and a ski visor, and then biking can be really pleasant. Rain sucks. Manageable, but it sucks.
Captain Muppet
4 hours ago
Reply to Headfullofair
In snow and sheet ice I commute by MTB on studded ice tyres. With the right clothes it’s fun.
I get that e-bikes can work and even be fun in the snow. I think it would be difficult trying to deliver food all day on one in the winter, though.
Ban car use for an entire industry because your sushi once took 15 minutes to get delivered? I had to check Bradley Brownell hadn’t moved to the Autopian.
Ouch, that one stung.
You know, it’s possible for one to use an example of how something personally affects you as part of an argument for the greater benefits (less pollution and congestion) of such a policy.
Absolutely. But why not pick a good example? Slight delay in sushi isn’t an issue I can sympathise with.