What Are We Doing to Our Truck Drivers?

When You Can't Do Your Job Without Breaking the Law

Driver in Old City; siren in Asbury Park.

My Uncle Henry was a truck driver, among other things. He even owned his own truck.  It doesn't seem to have gone very well. Fortunately, he also had a lifetime interest in horses. He understood horses and horse people, and as he got older he found himself doing more with horses, and a lot less with trucks.

Probably the only truck driver I've known in Philadelphia was my long-time UPS driver, Donna. Lovely lady. We were all so happy when her son came home from Iraq safely.

I've spent a fair amount of time watching truck drivers like Donna try to do their jobs in Center City. Just trying to do their jobs. We don't make it easy for them. And their bosses don't make it easy for them.

Fitting Cities for Cars and Trucks
The basic problem is one of geometry. Cars and trucks are quite big, and they don't fit well on streets in the older parts of many cities - in Philadelphia, Center City and South Philly are good examples.

For most of the twentieth century, there was a huge move to alter cities so they would better fit the motor vehicles flooding their streets. I haven't bought a new suit recently, but the concept is the same: the customer's body is a given; the suit must change to fit the body. The street and its intersections should be big enough to fit a very big truck with a very large turning radius.

In the nineteenth century, of course, cities spent a lot of time altering themselves to fit the new railroads. Cities are quite malleable; change is really a constant. However, it's nice when the changes are for the better.

It turns out that the people now flocking into old downtowns around the country are often attracted by the human scale, the older buildings, the walkability.

And so people have started to look at the concept of fitting the vehicles to the city. The original micromobility vehicle was the bicycle. And now the e-scooter has entered the scene.

Recently UPS has piloted a delivery e-tricycle in Seattle (for a story, click here). I suspect we're going to see a lot more commercial uses like this. They're not entirely new of course. I remember, growing up in New York City, that the grocery stores often used delivery bicycles; they looked a lot like modern cargo bikes. And Chinese restaurants have used delivery bicycles for years. I wonder when pizza shops are going to move to delivery bicycles?

Still, it seems clear that, for longer distances and bulkier goods, large trucks will be with us for the foreseeable future. So is it possible to fit these vehicles into streets that people like to walk on?

Complete Streets and Big Trucks Can Live Together
The answer is a qualified yes. Professor Alison Conway of the City College of New York and others have produced a report entitled "Complete Streets Considerations for Freight and Emergency Vehicle Operations." (I also consulted with profit the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission's "Philadelphia Delivery Handbook." )

Professor Conway's report presents an array of creative engineering solutions to the admittedly gnarly problem of fitting large vehicles into small spaces. I won't go through them all, but here are my two favorites.

First, the mini-roundabout with mountable interior curb. Roundabouts are still new in this country. They're dramatically smaller than the older traffic circles that most of us are familiar with - for instance, the circle in Logan Square, which consumes a vast amount of space (admittedly elegantly) and allows motor vehicles to navigate the circle at speed. Small roundabouts consume much less space and require motorists to actually slow down. The mini-roundabout continues the shrinkage. I've seen the small roundabouts in action; I look forward to the mini.

Mini-roundabout.

Small roundabout in Interlaken, N.J.

Second is the asymmetrical median nose. This has a full curb, but admittedly does cut down on standing space for pedestrians. Still, I think it can be useful in a pinch, without compromising on safety.

Asymmetrical median nose.

George Balanchine comes to street design. I'm very happy.

The Curb
Transportation planners like to talk about the last mile, but in Philadelphia the challenge is often the last ten feet. Eventually a delivery vehicle has to stop and unload and deliver its cargo. In Philadelphia, this often means parking at the curb, and in Philadelphia there is often no space at the curb.

So what's a truck driver to do? Actually, this is when the truck driver becomes a criminal. On the Chestnut Street commercial corridor in Center City, until recently, delivery trucks would often stop in the dedicated bus lane. Why? Because they didn't have any choice.

Recently this has changed. The City has launched a "Loading Pilot," which provides 80 feet of loading zone on each block, all day.

The Chestnut Street loading pilot is still in its early stages, but it already seems clear that the new loading zones are having the desired effect. Who knew? Truck drivers, as a group, are not particularly dedicated to breaking the law.  (I consider the Julius Silvert case to be an outlier.) They're just looking for a place to park. And with the bus lane clear, traffic is much less jumbly, and the bus ride is much less of a steeplechase.

The residential parts of Center City are also experiencing an access problem. My neighborhood is a good example. I live a few blocks south of Rittenhouse Square, in the southwest quadrant of William Penn's original plan for Philadelphia, and parking has been ridiculously tight here for decades.

The recent dramatic increase in package delivery, as well as pickups and drop-offs by companies such as Uber and Lyft, has only added to the problem.

I think it's fair to say that the boom in home delivery - as opposed to commercial deliveries up on Chestnut Street - has been giving the delivery companies fits. At least, at a store, someone is home. In the modern world, it's quite possible that nobody is home during the day. So you can have a failed delivery (the driver's boss will not be happy) or you can leave the package on the stoop, where one of our local porch pirates may decide it belongs to him.

Either way, not a good outcome. So the delivery companies have been looking into alternative models. First came the delivery lockers in convenience stores, and now, at 23rd and South, we have an actual pickup and return center from Amazon. You can see it in the picture below.

Take that, porch pirates! 23rd & South, Philadelphia.

None of this is new. The pickup center in a convenience store simply replicates the nineteenth-century arrangement with general store proprietors, who often also served as the local postmaster. And the Amazon pickup and drop-off center in the picture is taking a leaf from the book of Montgomery Ward and Sears, Roebuck in the nineteenth century, when they used the nation's expanding rail system to deliver their goods. Just go down to the local train station to pick up your new mail-order buggy - horse not included.

I think these new ways of getting packages to people will be successful, but I also think that home delivery is not going away. So how do we get curb space for all these trucks? The same way we did up on Chestnut Street. We turn parking spaces into loading zones.

And things will get better. I'm sure of it.

(The National Association of City Transportation Officials has a very helpful report entitled "Curb Appeal: Curbside Management Strategies for Improving Transit Reliability.")

See also Parking: Storage v. Access, Taming Chestnut Street, Unblocking the Bus Lane of Chestnut, Flex Posts on Pine and Spruce.