Curb Our Enthusiasm

This week a colleague working at the United States Postal Service (USPS) shared an article from Gizmodo describing Amazon Flex. The article provides eye-opening details of the specific handling of Amazon orders between their regional distributions centers (or Fulfillment Centers) and their ultimate delivery destinations. In the transportation profession, this is known as “the last mile,” and it applies to everything from commercial deliveries through public transportation use — basically every journey starts and ends somewhere; hence, the “first” and “last” mile of a trip.

With the ubiquity and constant growth of online and app-based consumer activities, the last mile of a commercial good is getting a lot more attention. That’s because the last mile of virtually any commercial good being ordered and delivered to a customer requires the same thing — space to put the delivery vehicle. Unless you are getting a single, unique delivery being hand-delivered to your door from the place where the product was created (think of a custom sculpture), odds are the courier bringing that product is also delivering multiple other products to multiple destinations during a single day of work or shift. So that means most couriers have to use some kind of vehicle to securely hold all the goods they are delivering, and that therefore means that the space required to put that delivery vehicle has to be big enough to accommodate the vehicle and close enough so that the good(s) can be carried from the vehicle to the ultimate destination.

In most major urban areas, the space for delivery vehicles is the curb. Curb space is always in demand, for a wide variety of reasons. Just this last week, I read a tweet where someone said “curbs are the new black,” and even major news outlets are saying that cities are starting to pay more attention to curbspace management. Maybe. Maybe we are just now paying more attention to curb space due to ever increasing demands. Maybe our efforts of recent years to better utilize on-street parking spaces by converting some to parklets or bike corrals is making people realize that there are trade-offs — since now commercial deliveries can’t get as close to their ultimate destinations. Maybe our efforts in recent years to add more street furniture, more bike racks and bike share stations, and generally make sidewalks more people-focused is suddenly making us realize that large pallets of deliveries and hand carts full of Amazon packages have a tough time negotiating these areas.

In any case, a lot of us in the transportation profession recognize that curb space management needs some improvements, and we need to act fast in order to get our arms around a problem that is continuing to increase. We’ve seen ride hailing companies working with local cities to designate specific drop-off and pick-up locations along curbs, and we’ve seen private commercial carriers working with cities to launch bicycle delivery services, in an effort to reduce the strain on curb space.

Here in Los Angeles, I’m very excited to be leading a project with the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) to address last-mile delivery challenges for freight in the greater Los Angeles area. Our project began in the summer, and since June we’ve convened two meetings with a group of stakeholders from both the private and public sectors. We’ve held one-on-one meetings with some of these stakeholders, and all this talk of curb management makes me want to share some initial findings:

• The game is changing so fast. The carriers that we’ve spoken with, the companies and entities that do the last-mile delivery, are changing their operations almost daily. Seriously. From what we’ve heard, it is because of a perfect storm of increasing ecommerce (online shopping and on-demand delivery), increasing roadway congestion, and time and space limitations restricting delivery abilities. So what worked last year won’t necessarily work this year. For many of the carriers, that means finding new local distribution hubs, getting more delivery vehicles out, or overhauling the entire way they receive and distribute packages.
• Everyone answers to the customer. Have you ever noticed the messages when you’re purchasing something online that say “order in the next 14 minutes to receive your package tomorrow?” Well, the online seller is making a guarantee in that statement, and darn it, they mean to live up to their promises. But the online seller is not typically the person making the last-mile delivery. And the online seller is very frequently not the actual entity with a truck or plane shipping the good from the point of origin to another destination. So that means a private commercial carrier needs to 1) get to the online sellers warehouse or production facility within a set time period, and 2) modify their carrier routes on the fly to accommodate new orders. This all sounds good hypothetically; it is a totally different story when all of a sudden you need to get your commercial delivery vehicles from the Westside of Los Angeles to Downtown in less than 45 minutes on a Thursday afternoon. The commercial carriers have to deal with these logistical challenges, if they want to keep their customers and stay in business.
• Commercial carriers want buildings to change. One carrier told us that they try to work with architects at new developments to make sure the mail or shipping room is right near the front door, and within a few feet of an open curb space. Gee, that sounds like the same dream every single occupant vehicle driver in all of Los Angeles dreams of — a parking space right in front of where they want to go. How do developers address this? Based on my anecdotal observations of new high-rise condominiums in Downtown Los Angeles, they like to have big, airy, open lobby areas with coffee shops. I haven’t seen a lot of mail rooms. I also see a lot of big trucks and other commercial vehicles parked in red curb zones and next to retail establishments, not using the designated loading dock served by the alley behind the building. This is because most of the commercial carriers agree it is too difficult to navigate to these areas, and far easier and more time-efficient to park on the street. Don’t even get them started on vehicle heights — some commercial carriers have told us that they’re moving towards taller vehicles, which can better store packages in a format for ease of distribution, and those vehicles are typically taller than the roughly seven-foot height of most garages and loading bays.

• Public agencies don’t have the data. Sadly, cities don’t have good data on how their curb space is currently regulated, and/or how it is currently being used. There have been some great advancements in recent years, from real-time parking space occupancy programs and innovative parking studies; however, we still don’t have a reliable data source to know where all of our yellow commercial loading zones are versus red curbs or other zones. And it doesn’t seem like a priority to get this data — after all, it is very labor intensive when you’re talking about something like 7,000 miles of streets in a city like Los Angeles.
• Commercial carriers are willing to pay for solutions. Whenever I speak with a commercial carrier, I always ask if they would be open to a program where they could pay a certain fee for a permit, or something like a congestion pricing charge, to either access designated loading areas at certain times or receive some guarantee of reliable travel time between a distribution center and a major delivery area. The carriers I’ve spoken with always enthusiastically answer yes, and some of them say they’ve tried programs like the ones I described in places like New York City, only to find that the programs actually cost more than they had been paying out in parking fines. So they stopped participating in the programs, because they just didn’t pencil out economically.
• Curb space is always in demand. This may sound simple, but we have really started to document just how in-demand curb space is. I’m not talking about a need to have a ride hailing vehicle stop at the curb to pick up a passenger, I’m talking about the need for a commercial delivery company to park a vehicle for a number of minutes or sometimes hours, to distribute packages to multiple customers across a wider area, and sometimes even act as a micro-distribution hub for other carriers. This demand can’t just happen late at night or early in the morning, especially in urban areas where affluent residents are prone to complaining about noise. The demand is driven by the customers, who as I wrote above, want everything all the time. So as much as we try to provide time restrictions and other regulations to manage curb space, commercial delivery activities will still need to go on, at all times.

We’re only a few months into our project. I’m looking forward to speaking with more stakeholders, and over the busy holiday shopping season we will start to do detailed case studies of specific locations throughout Los Angeles. Personally, I’m excited for the opportunity to ride along with some of these carriers, to really get a feel for a day in the life of their carriers.

In closing, it is great to hear so many people talking about curb space management these days, and I’m excited to be working on a project to develop some real solutions. Hopefully, that is. Like so many complex issues, we’re going to need to have a diverse set of tools in the toolbox, and one solution will often not work for everyone. By starting with a very deep dive into the detailed inner workings of commercial deliveries, coupled with a thorough understanding of the needs of public regulators and policy-makers, I’m certain we can accomplish our goals.