How online shopping is putting further pressure on our cities
Changing shopping habits and the relentless pursuit of convenience are creating major traffic problems for a growing number of cities. In New York alone, about 1.5 million packages are delivered to homes every day, meaning thousands of delivery vehicles operating under tight deadlines that not only drive recklessly sometimes, block roads when they make a delivery, but also are contributing to air pollution. And that’s without getting into the packaging headache the massive increase in food deliveries or online purchases has created.
Package delivery is still regulated in the same way it was when it was in the pre-internet era, and requires urgent regulation. Now, we not only make use of services that require round-the-clock delivery logistics, deliveries take place seven days a week from early in the morning to late in the evening. The result is armies of poorly coordinated vans that flood cities every day and that typically double park or use spaces not intended for them.
We urgently need policies to make better use of street parking, which takes up valuable public space for private use. In short we have to find a balance between the convenience we demand and the need for rationalization that would typically involve not just establishing times for delivery and procedures to avoid systematically impeding traffic in…
