Signal 3: Analytics and traffic, so what of it?
The city of Chicago, UPS and a group of tech companies team up to conduct a study regarding road congestion caused by package delivery services, to pinpoint areas where congestion happens due to these delivery trucks. So the question here is, what is that going to do? Hold that thought for a second, and take a step back. If you live in an apartment with a considerable mail room or area, you’d notice the boxes the piled up and you’d notice that even on a given day of the week that it could be empty, in a day or two, it will be filled up again. This should give you a semblance of how important these delivery services are, some people depend on it.
It’s been said that when we ask for predictions in traffic, we have to remember that we do so because we want to be able to get to places, freely, and these problems tend to just about geometry (Walker, 2017). By geometry, knowing that a particular place is heavily congested by trucks and re-routing these trucks isn’t automatically going to clear things up. In economic theory, people will adjust their expectations with knowledge and act on them, this applies to roads as well, in fact there’s the whole notion of induced demand. This has been know and this naturally brings up topics such as congestion pricing. But considering the dependence on delivery services, real question is, if consumers will adjust their behaviour or as such?
But for what it’s worth, maybe this can bring transformational and structural change. The article mentions the possibility for innovative solutions to the existing problem, and it isn’t new to existing ride-sharing companies and tech startups venturing into the “delivery sharing services” but we’re talking about movement of goods that no bike or a pickup can’t probably handle but that in itself may bring a whole new opportunity should policy be crafted to affect consumer behavior and their insistence for package delivery services. Maybe, all it needs is the analytics output to hammer down the nail for innovation.
References:
Walker, J. (2018, September 30). Jarrett Walker: Planning Transit: Can We Live Without Predictions? Lecture presented at Can We Live without Prediction? The Video, Seattle.
Wisniewski, M. (2018, September 17). Tech companies, UPS team up to examine delivery truck congestion problem. Retrieved September 30, 2018, from http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/wisniewski/ct-biz-delivery-truck-congestion-study-20180913-story.html
