UPS Drivers Using Bikes to Deliver Packages This Christmas. I Seen it Wit Me Own Two Eyes.
So I came home from work today and saw a woman riding a bike loaded to the gills with cardboard boxes on a heavy duty bike trailer. At first I thought it was just another one of the local crazies that rides their bikes from one side of the town to the other all day long, but I’d never seen her before, and if you’ve lived in my town for as many years as I have, you get to know who our crazies are.
I watched her ride her bike around my neighborhood (it’s a small neighborhood) with a bit of a detached interest as I unloaded things from my car. She stopped every now and then, picked a package out of her clown-car-stuffed trailer and dropped it off at various neighbors’ doors.
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My first thought was that somebody had started a bike delivery service. I actually had had this thought at one point, but then decided there wouldn’t be much money in it. After a while, my curiosity got the better of me, so I went to investigate.
Turns out, the woman is a UPS driver — a UPS driver at the bottom the totem pole to be more exact. And she was very nice. Apparently, UPS had some bean counters crunch numbers and find out that by replacing a certain number of trucks with bikes in the more temperate winter climates, they could save a boatload of money over the holiday season. In the case of my local UPS district, $36,000 to be exact.
I never got her name, but she said that she only knew for sure that UPS was conducting the program in Oregon, California and Washington. She didn’t seem like she was happy about kind of being forced to do it because of her status as a noob driver, but she said it really wasn’t that bad except for when she had to ride in the hilly parts of town.
She said that she hasn’t had to deal with any rain yet, but that she was worried that when the rain does start it might get pretty ugly for her — although it certainly looks like they’ve outfitted her to deal with bad weather.
I mean, look at that bike, it’s decked out. Check out the camo handwarmers. I’m not sure why they gave her a mountain bike though, it’s not like she’s going off-roading. A commuter bike with some smooth tires and a more comfortable sitting position would have been a much better choice. Methinks they didn’t actually consult with any real cyclists.
You know though… I’m having trouble doing the math. I mean, yeah they can save on fuel by not using the trucks, and certainly it helps cut down on emissions (yay environment!), but using my all-knowing powers of guesstimation, you’d have to make like 10 bike trips to carry the same amount of crap that one of their trucks can. That doesn’t really matter, I guess, if you’re not worried about volume or time, but it seems that a company like UPS is inherently worried about both of those things.
Anyway, I’m not the bean counter with the UPS statistics, so don’t hold me to that analysis. And if UPS is convinced they can save money and help the environment at the same time, so am I!
Admittedly, I’m a little late to this story as UPS announced the program a month or so ago. But it was completely new news to me, and I’m guessing most of you didn’t know about it yet either.
One other perk the UPS bike driver commented on: she has a lot more conversations like the one she had with me today. In that sense, I guess you could say it’s a bit of a community builder too. Imagine if we all had reasons like that to talk with the service people who come and go throughout our busy days.
We might actually start treating each other like human beings.
Photo Credit: The author’s own handiwork. Note that the photo was altered to provide some amount of anonymity to the UPS bike driver. I did ask her if I could take it beforehand.
The probable irony is that the calculation that found that these bikes saved UPS money was probably made based on the price of gas at $4. Now below $2, they are like so many other companies both in and out of the energy business that have gotten caught in the downdraft of falling oil prices.
Meh. They’ll be up again.
It’s not every year you have complete catastrophic worldwide economic collapse. There is a finite remaining supply, and it is more and more expensive to get to it.
Big problem is how do they get the packages to the bike riders? I am sure with big brown trucks. Then how do they keep people from stealing the packages when they go inside a store to deliver them. Also what happens if it rains or snows? This is just a simple case of greenwashing. UPS wants everyone to think they are being proactive, but please don’t notice they are not wearing any clothes.
I would think this would actually make sense in some urban areas, where traffic and parking headaches make delivering with large trucks a hassle.
I wouldn’t be so quick to judge this as a pr stunt, after all, the USPS still delivers mail in some areas on foot. You take out the monumental costs associated with purchasing, maintaining, and insuring a big truck and you find a lot of cost savings.
They can’t have more than a couple of grand into that bike and trailer. Only cost that stays the same is that for paying the driver. Bet he/she stays in shape too
I could see this working in dense areas. They could start out from local distribution centers (or even a truck) and taking loads of packages.
@ Cameron,
They still have to use the big truck to get the packages to the bike rider. USPS delivers on foot because it is cheaper and they don’t carry large packages. Also that trailer can not hold many packages so the rider would lose A LOT of time riding back to the depot. UPS would have to employ a lot more bike riders to cover the same area as 1 truck. Sure it makes a smaller carbon footprint, but if you need 6 riders to do the job of 1 driver it does not seem very efficient. I guess they are paying the bikers considerably less than the drivers.
I don’t think that UPS would do something like this without a great deal of forethought, especially in a critical time like the holidays. This is the same company that uses custom software to create their daily delivery maps so there are no left turns, because the gas wasted while waiting for the left turn light was tens of thousands of gallons.
I suspect they are using the bikes because the cost of getting more trucks for a brief spike in deliveries is not cost effective, while a bike/trailer is is cheap to add, and there are lots of folks looking for work.
the idea has potential.
at the moment using bikes you deliver less packages per day.
but what about using electric bikes ? or electric scooters ?
and maybe if needed a bigger trailer?
and because of much lower capital costs , it could give ups more flexibility.
there’s really good potential for saving money.
I’m guessing they are doing it because bikes are so damn cheap. They can probably get one for the cost of
2 or 3 hand-trucks that a normal driver uses. I bet they will do no maintenance on these machines and then
sell them on Craig’s list after the holidays.
I was a UPS driver for 20yrs. My route was about 90% residential, and every holiday season I had a driver helper.
Believe me, while good press is a nice side effect, I’m sure this was done to save money. Big Brown has an army of industrial engineers that analyze everything.
Really though, it makes some sense at the holidays. My route would normally run 140-150 stops per day. During the holidays it could jump to 300-320 stops per day, still within the same physical area.
Someone on a bike, in an area with a high delivery density, could be very effective.