7 September 2019 | New Scientist | 43diverge, splintering and slowing like a river
delta, as the packages wend their way to busy
residential streets and city centres.
Most deliveries are made by vans. In London
alone, vans make up to 400,000 personal
deliveries to offices every day. The number of
kilometres driven by vans each year is soaring
(see graph, page 45). This is bad news because
vans are more polluting than cars. They spit
out more nitrous oxides – poisonous gases
that can reduce lung function, irritate the
eyes and corrode teeth.Route of the problem
When Wright arrived for his first shift, he was
guided to a line of vehicles waiting to receive
their packages. He had signed up to work with
the Amazon Flex app, and he used this to sign
in by scanning a QR code in the depot. Then he
was given a collection of packages. When he
was ready to set off, the app calculated a driving
route for him. In theory, its algorithm works
out the most efficient route, although that is a
notoriously difficult problem to solve. Wright
later learned that experienced Flex drivers use
their own nous and other wayfinding apps to
complete their deliveries faster.
These alternative routes can make a big
difference. Oliver Bates at Lancaster University
and his colleagues recently studied 25 UK
delivery drivers who were working on a
single day. They found a pair of drivers who
had delivered the same number of packages
in the same areas, but one managed to drive
a 44 per cent shorter route and spend 35 per
cent less time delivering each package on
average. That suggests drivers can be more
efficient. “A lot of technological advances and
investment has been made on the depot side
in sorting and filtration, but the pointy end
of the spear – the drivers – are still doing things
in much the same way,” says Sarah Wise at
University College London, who worked with
Bates on the study.
The navigation systems used by Amazon,
DPD, FedEx and other delivery firms are often
inefficient, and many are adapted from those
of haulage firms that move freight long
distances, not around cities. One problem they
don’t account for is that the registered address
of a company might not be the place where
packages need to be dropped off. A bigger
annoyance is that the systems take drivers to
the delivery address without factoring in the
need to park. It can be more efficient for drivers
to leave their vehicle in one place and deliver
several items on foot, rather than finding
multiple parking spots.high street. People only had things delivered
when it was really needed, and it had been like
that for decades.
Online shopping still accounts for only
about a tenth of retail sales in many developed
countries. But what is important is the pace of
growth. In 2015, each UK household placed just
over two online orders a month. Next year,
the average household is predicted to order
something online once a week.
It is the final leg of the parcel’s journey where
the problems crop up, known figuratively as
“the last mile”. Until this stage, many goods
have taken the same route, shipped around the
world on huge vessels and then driven along
motorways on lorries. They then arrive at a
distribution centre, normally just outside a
large town, and at this point their routes >The woes of workers in the gig economy
have long been making headlines. What is
rarely considered is the problems that
deliveries create for the environment and life
in cities. Vans aren’t just carrying packages and
stressed drivers, they are also belching out air
pollution and clogging up streets – and that
affects us all.
It doesn’t have to be this way. If we are
smart, we can make deliveries less painful for
people like Wright, and less polluting for us all.
Making more deliveries on bikes or even by
delivery robots could help. Some people want
to go even further and completely reinvent the
way we do home delivery.
Ten or 20 years ago, many of us drove to a
supermarket to do food shopping. When you
needed a new skirt or shirt, you went to the