Our home delivery habit reshaped the world • Hacker News Board

Re: Our home delivery habit reshaped the world

#51

Post by ip26 » Sat, Nov 23, 2019, 5:51 PM UTC

makomk wrote: post #40

ip26 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pitfall is that gas taxes are apparently not strongly correlated to road wear. A gallon of gas in a passenger vehicle does dramatically less road damage than a gallon of gas in a delivery truck.

Hmmm. Last mile deliveries are generally a mixture of passenger cars and small vans, whereas deliveries to stores are done using large trucks with disproportionately more road wear. Maybe store deliveries should be taxed higher than home deliveries?

The ideal would be something like, per vehicle, measure mileage and multiply that by a road-wear lookup table indexed with gross vehicle weight rating & number of axles. Cost would be passed down to the consumer and then the market would sort it all out.

Re: Our home delivery habit reshaped the world

#52

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Nov 25, 2019, 2:37 PM UTC

jpindar wrote: post #17

dangus wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how accurate this theory of mine is since I've done zero research and I'm not an expert on anything, but one could make the argument that one delivery doesn't have the same impact as one individual's trip to the store. Let's say I take a weekly trip to the store in my car. I also have to park it at the store during my trip, meaning the store must use extra land for parking spaces. Does the delivery truck…

>You pass aisles with endcaps of stuff you don't need, you pass the beer and liquor section, and perhaps all the things you want are placed at the back of the store - on purpose, so you pass other items. Isn't this why Amazon's search function is so terrible?

[deleted]

Re: Our home delivery habit reshaped the world

#53

Post by sharkmerry » Mon, Nov 25, 2019, 5:22 PM UTC

crazygringo wrote: post #48

sharkmerry wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious to compare. Public Transit bus weighs 44k fully loaded. Assuming only seated passengers, it holds 44 people so 1000lb per person. A car is 4000lbs on average. Fully loaded (with standing) holds 92 people. 478lb/person.

So if you’re curious, you’ll enjoy knowing road wear isn’t linear with weight — it’s exponentially proportional . Almost all road wear comes from large trucks and buses. So linear division doesn’t actually have relevance here. Buses are far, far worse than the equivalent number of cars in terms of road wear... but again, it's a non-issue because road wear isn't a main consideration. https://www.vabike.org/vehicle-wei…

the first comment about the sprinter vans shows that its exponential for road wear. Youre arguing roadwear doesnt matter but arguing against busses.

I just wanted to see what weight per person was. Doesnt matter as much for road wear, but as you were saying, pollution etc matters too, and weight per person matters for the other factors. Not weight per axle like road wear

Re: Our home delivery habit reshaped the world

#54

Post by mantas » Wed, Nov 27, 2019, 5:34 PM UTC

dominotw wrote: post #50

mantas wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heavy vehicles put exponentially more wear. Especially if the road was not built for having that weight on it. Let's say you build a drive way for a car. You could park a 2 ton car every day for decades with no damage. Yet a massive truck parked once may fuck it up due to it's sheer weight.

that would make sense if roads are built for 5 trips of a car than 1 trip of truck. ( Because car is travelling longer with that one gallon of gallon.) Is that true though that X cars travelling a mile of road would do less damage than 1 truck traveling on that same road?

The problem is big load, even if for a short amount of time. Just like for bridges. If a bridge can sustain a car a minute, that doesn't necessarily mean that it could sustain a truck once...