Some of the challenges we face today are as old as humanity itself: the need for food and shelter; the desire for companionship; the mortal threat of illness and natural disasters. Other challenges are unique to the 21st century: figuring out which of the ninety billion shows on your streaming services to watch; wandering naked into the shot during your spouse’s Zoom meeting; misgendering your Amazon delivery man person entity.
Then there are the problems that are both modern and timeless, like ass-ploding e-bikes:
It’s a timeless problem because the e-bikes that are ass-ploding are generally used by workers trying to survive. But it’s a modern problem because, obviously, batteries, and also the e-bike owners are riding for food delivery apps, which themselves are a 21st century phenomenon. (Though the general concept also came and went during the first dot com bubble.) Here’s what a food delivery app does not do:
- Make the food (that’s the restaurant’s problem)
- Supply the delivery equipment (that’s the rider’s problem)
- Employ the rider (they’re independent contractors)
- Solve any problems whatsoever (it’s been incredibly easy to order in as long as I’ve been alive)
Here’s what the delivery app does:
- Inserts itself as a middleman in a transaction between a customer and a restaurant by riding on the back of a deliveryman and giving him a cut while literally burning the city down in the process
Because this business model comes with a host of problems, including but not limited to delivery people riding on the sidewalk, delivery people getting killed, and delivery riders inadvertently burning down buildings with their batteries, policymakers have been exploring various ways to address them. As far as I know, one approach has not been to tell the delivery apps, “If you want to conduct business in New York City, you’ve got to furnish workers with delivery vehicles and create hubs where batteries and equipment can be safely stored and maintained.” Presumably these delivery apps are capable of such feats, since they’re able to build out large spaces in landmark buildings for employees who could probably just as easily do their jobs from their laptops in their overpriced apartments:
But instead the latest idea is for the city itself to build these hubs, which has met with some resistance:
NIMBYism is basically advocacy shorthand for reactionary selfishness at the expense of the public good. However, what the article fails to note is that this charging hub would be built on the sidewalk:
Advocates have often rightly reminded us that one of the great crimes of motordom was that it robbed the city of sidewalk space:
They also used to push the idea of a “green transportation hierarchy” that put pedestrians first:
This has been upended in the App Age, as advocates have found common cause with the app companies, for which you really can’t blame them. See, for decades, the goal of advocates has been to reduce private car use in cities; then, here came these companies flush with venture capital whose entire business model was based on replacing private car trips. This is why advocates hailed companies like Uber as conquering heroes:
That tweet aged about as well as Paul Krugman’s comment about the Internet and fax machines.
Of course, Uber came to New York, car ownership continued to increase, the streets became choked with Ubers since (surprise!) summoning cars with the push of a button results in more cars (over half the car traffic in parts of Manhattan is for-hire vehicles), and the only thing it really reduced was the number of yellow cab drivers, who simply started offing themselves when their city-issued medallions suddenly plummeted in value:
Now we have e-bike food delivery. Like ride-hailing apps, e-bike food delivery is attractive to advocates, mostly because it involves e-bikes, which they’ve been pitching for years as the innovation that’s going to finally reduce or eliminate short motor vehicle trips once and for all–with the added benefit that they can portray anyone who doesn’t think we should build stuff like e-bike delivery hubs on the sidewalk as NIMBYs who hate immigrants:
Of course, e-bikes, whether used privately or commercially, have done nothing whatsoever to reduce motor vehicle traffic or ownership in and around New York City. And why would it? An e-bike is not a replacement for a car. An e-bike is a replacement for a bike:
That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of people out there who will tell you about how they bought some sort of e-cargo bike and found they can leave the car parked a little more often, but it is to say that here in New York City we’ve had e-bikes for years and the only profound change you can point to is that there’s this whole new industry that, quite frankly, sucks for everybody involved:
Where is the “environmental boon” in all of this? I thought we were supposed to “think local.” Before delivery apps you ordered from restaurants that were close to you. Now you can also order from restaurants that are farther from you, and a bunch of people on e-bikes and gasoline-powered scooters and any other contraption they can get their hands on will race each-other to pick it up for you.
We sacrificed quite a bit for the motor vehicle, but to my knowledge the city never built filling stations on the sidewalk because people were storing gasoline in their homes and burning them to the ground. UPS and FedEx block traffic and park in bike lanes and all the rest of it, but to my knowledge the city has never proposed converting news kiosks into parcel delivery hubs. So why you would push for publicly-funded and maintained sidewalk food delivery e-bike hubs instead of requiring the app companies to provide proper accommodations and equipment to the people who do all their work for them is beyond me. You’d think these app companies building out lavish headquarters for themselves so that they can look out onto the streets where the people making the deliveries are whizzing around on e-bikes that will eventually immolate them in their sleep would be the real source of outrage. Like if you’re delivering for DoorDash and you need to take a leak can you stop at the Flatiron Building headquarters and even use the bathroom? I’d like to see the Streetsbloggers try that, it would be a good complement to the whole license plate thing.
People don’t give up speed or convenience, which means e-bikes and food delivery apps aren’t going going away, and it would be silly to insist that they should. But we do need to be mindful of what we give up for that speed and convenience…like, you know, the sidewalk. In our haste to undo the damage done by motor vehicles it sometimes seems like we just make it worse.
