Today, the Spiegel published an article about problems with increased (online) mail order trade and current conditions of this industry. First, let’s be fair and say that this is less of a journalistic article and more of a collection of quotes/interviews of people involved in the parcel delivery business. Therefore, it provides some background how people in this industry are thinking problem solving wise. The core idea is that the customer comes to some place to pick up the parcel instead of getting it delivered otherwise it would be more expensive. In my opinion this type of thinking does not solve the problem and provides only little to no help in short term.
Contents
Current Situation and Problem Identification
The current situation of parcel delivery is tricky. It is much more effective to deliver goods directly to people and it is more efficient from an energy perspective.
The biggest challenge is to find suitable parcel deliverer that deliver parcels without causing damage and trouble. This is a far bigger challenge than it sounds.
Furthermore, there is another catch. This is the timing of delivery. Depending on population structures in given areas, most people are working and not at home when the parcel deliverer arrives. It seems like Amazon Logistics (at least in Germany) provides a slightly better schedule for full-time employees. In addition, we have sparsely and densely populated areas which have their own characteristics.
Another point that we can observe is extremely low-quality road and urban planning and maintenance that cause a lot of traffic jams. This causes delivery trucks to waste hours in traffic without delivering any parcels and therefore value to customers.
A reduction in consumption or buy stuff locally at a retailer does not help either. Furthermore, the first may even result in higher energy consumption and less efficiency whereas the latter leads do higher energy consumption and perhaps even more traffic.
Let us sum up the key problems:
- Lack of suitable parcel deliverers.
- Are people at home?
- Where do people live? Densely or sparsely populated areas?
- Low-quality road net and bad urban planning.
Solutions
Autonomous Vehicles
This will clearly solve all problems regarding traffic jams and route optimization if and only if almost all vehicles are autonomous. Otherwise the autonomous delivery truck would get stuck in traffic. Therefore, this is a solution for long to medium distance transport (hubs to smaller distribution centers). Furthermore, autonomous vehicles do not solve the delivery problem alone since suitable packet deposits would be required if people are not at home.
Drone Delivery Systems
This sounds great. However, let us think about a dense urban environment like central London. Furthermore, this implies some form of ubiquitous aerial defense system is required to handle the risk of terrorist attacks. Hence it is less feasible in dense metropolitan areas considering a direct to person delivery. However, eVTOL (electric Vertical Take-Off and Landing) of bigger UAVs allow for parcel delivery to central packet deposits in rural areas.
Underground Cargo Distribution Systems
In the past centuries our sewage systems went from above ground to underground. Depending where you live, your electricity is delivered using subsurface cables. Most utilities are below the surface. As parts of our infrastructure are underground already this is an opportunity to bundle all underground utilities in structures that allow for easy access to reduce maintenance costs. Such an underground delivery system makes only sense if there is a pick-up station/deposit in every building.
A partial solution is CargoCap. However, it seems like the project is dead. Perhaps the Sidewalk Toronto deploys such a system. If I remember correctly, then they want to put the entire garbage handling underground. Hence, they may come up with a suitable solution for cargo handling as well.
Parcel Pick-up Stations
Most people work - some way or another. There is a clear trend towards breaking up the nine-to-five scheme and foster home office/remote work. However, not everyone is at home 24/7 to receive deliveries. All the solutions mentioned above require a few years of either technology testing or construction works. However, there is a cheaper solution for instant improvements would be to install parcel boxes and pick-up stations everywhere. This way it would be closer an already existing system called mailbox. Depending where we live, such systems is already in place. However, they are not deployed widely enough.