London Banter - Uber Representative Calls For A United Protest

On 14/02/2019 07:48, Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 07:25:14 on Thu, 14 Feb
2019, Someone Somewhere remarked:
On 13/02/2019 16:31, wrote:
On 12 Feb 2019 20:34:46 +0000 (GMT)
Theo wrote:
John Williamson wrote:
On 12/02/2019 17:27, wrote:

I have wondered if all the transport companies should have got
together
and refused to make deliveries if they have to pay the charge and see
what the little squirt does when the shelves empty in central london.
I drive a coach for a living, and I know that the industry has been
lobbying strongly, and has been totally ignored. I assume the haulage
industry has been doing the same.

The purpose of the plan is to reduce the polluting vehicles in central
London, which it's acknowledged cause too high levels of pollution.
Presumably, lorries and coaches are a big contributor?

So what are the industry proposals that would be a better way to
achieve
pollution reductions?Â* What is the industry lobbying *for*, as
opposed to
lobbying *against*? (lobbying against taxes is no surprise)

If you dispute that lorries and coaches are major contributors, do
you have
evidence for that?Â* If you dispute that pollution is too high,
evidence for
that?
Â*The bus and haulage industry don't build the vehicles. Stuff has to be
delivered somehow unless you want to go back to horse drawn carts and
until
battery technology allows viable electric goods vehicles and buses**
then its
going be diesel.

What about the efficiency of the deliveries?Â* How many vans etc are
driving around half empty?

Maybe some idea of huge depots on the M25 where things are delivered
to and then have some system of allocating particular areas to
particular delivery companies so they send in full vehicles that do as
little driving as possible?

Yes - it doesn't work for big goods and/or things that come on lorries
(although it does work for things that come on pallets) but it would
be a start.

A lot of the things being delivered in central London will be in
(wheeled) cages. It's a bit unusual to see a fork-lift truck unloading
palettes in WC1. The trick with cages is to load them into the van in
the correct order, so the ones you want first are by the doors at the back.

Distribution depots on/outside the M25 already do a pretty good job
sorting and consolidating deliveries. They don't send one truck of baked
beans around several destinations, followed by a truck of Cornflakes to
make numerous drop-offs. They'll load the truck with a mixture of Baked
Beans, Cornflakes etc and try to have the minimum number of drop-offs.

Nor did I say they did - I was excluding things that came on lorries as
I fully admit they are already better optimised - I'm talking about the
myriad of white vans.

What you're describing is the supermarket model which is as you say is
pretty well optimised, but that only forms a portion of the deliveries
in question.

If I order someething online can come from a variety of couriers, each
with their own vans and routes - if those routes could be made a quarter
as long by consolidation on the last mile then surely that can improve
things?