Have you ever been in a city? Practically every street has stores that need deliveries. Does every street get a tram track?
this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2023
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I think a good use would be to go from an industrial area to another, or to a cargo hub.
That is apparently what this tram did, although normally heavy rail would fill this role.
Use trams to get goods to neighbourhoods, then distribute from there.
Trains to distribution center, pneumatic tubes from distribution center to every home and business.
I want my green steampunk future cities.
Practically every street has stores
Mmh in my experience actually not. Very distinct streets in the centre are shopping streets (with residential on the higher floors). Many neighbourhoods are just residential.
https://www.zermatt.ch/en/sustainability/Elektros-Autofrei-Anreise/Zermatt-is-car-free
while you could argue the specialized electric buses and delivery vans are "Cars" they cannot drive on normal roads and do not produce pollution, in terms of emissions or noise, like regular cars. It's more than possible to build a car free city, its been done before.
I believe the tracks for the long distance trains should go to warehouse or distributions whatever then cargo bikes would deliver them locally.
Have you ever seen how much stuff your typical courier has in their van?
Counterpoint: https://youtu.be/R63DdEe_8aM
I love how that clip has multiple shots of trucks absolutely full of boxes, while making the case for a vehicle that could fit inside the truck as it's replacement.
I think you just missed the point entirely. You don't actually have to load up as many items in a cargo bike, because it's inherent advantages in urban contexts more than makes up for its inability to load up as many items.
What does that mean, exactly? What inherent advantages?
They are spelled out clearly in the video:
- Bicycle deliveries can utilize bicycle infrastructure and not get stuck in traffic
- Bicycle deliveries can at times navigate around traffic
- Bicycle deliveries have an easier time parking at the point of delivery
- Bicycle deliveries for obvious reasons require less fuel
- Bicycle deliveries require less capital cost, as their vehicles are cheaper than their counterparts
If I own a grocery, it's going to take a hell of a lot of bike trips to and from the warehouse to restock every day. Or I could employ an army of bikers. Or one truck.
Ok, so deliver food via truck. Choose the appropriate means of transportation for each type of last-mile delivery. The 200 gram Amazon package most certainly does not require a heavy truck to deliver.
It seems I missed the point. I had deliveries in mind where the truck is mostly empty most of the time. Restocking with a truck or cargo tram (depending on the environment) would make more sense.
The answer should be yes. In fact we should dig up the bicycle lanes to make way for tram tracks.
A tram to every driveway please. I want my own tram
This is actually how americans think transit should work.
I want this globally, I want to drive my tram from Albuquerque to Amsterdam
Or maybe make deliveries on cargo bikes.
Sounds like a pretty niche use case, there's not many factories in the middle of cities that have a tram line running to them.
And at 15 tonne per car, 7.5 in the end cars, the payload isn't particularly impressive either.
This also didn't deliver product to the final destination, which is what most urban trucks are doing.
but something like this would get product coming-in from outside a metro area close enough to high-density population and business centers to where smaller EV delivery vehicles or postal services (they already go door-to-door each day) can do the 'last-mile'.
It really sounds like you're inventing a use case for this technology, to be honest. Most logistics centres are on the outskirts of the city, and linehaul vehicles are loaded and unloaded there, having something like that in the city centre would be a very inefficient use of space.
It also wouldn't reduce the vehicle movements inside the city by much at all.
Chicago used to have an underground subway system just for freight https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/collex/exhibits/under-your-feet/chicagos-freight-tunnels/