On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, James Farrar wrote:

On Tue, 20 Feb 2007 09:21:58 +0000, Tom Anderson
wrote:

What's the typical deliver size? Or rather, what weight would you say 80%
of deliveries are smaller than or equal to? Would it be small enough to do
by bike (using a freight bike of some sort, rather than a courier's
panniers)?

Most jobs go in (as a minimum) an A4 box (i.e. a box that would contain
five reams of A4 80gsm.

That kind of thing would easily be doable by freight bike - may i ask how
you deliver it at the moment? Presumably you don't have a van trip for
each delivery; pile multiple deliveries into one van and go on a tour
round all the customers?

Not to mention large scale deliveries. As I was leaving work this
morning we had 50+ reams of paper turn up. How are they supposed to
deliver that without a lorry?

I assume you get your paper in quite big sheets - 50 reams of A4 at 80 gsm
is 125 kg, doable on a trike or 8-freight or something. If it's A0,
though, that's two tonnes, which i would certainly agree requires motor
power!

Actually, I got that wrong. It was 20 boxes of A4 which is 100 reams.
Plus some A3 and other stuff.

A0 paper comes in rolls - 200m long, works out to maybe 10cm across at a
guess. 24 rolls on a pallet.

Okay, any of that'd be rather hard to shift by bike, i think. Although i
did start wondering if you could build a tandem derivative of an 8-freight
(a 16-freight?) which could handle a pallet - a problem to leave to a real
engineer, i think!

For those of you not familiar with the 8-freight:

http://www.velovision.com/mag/issue9/8freight.pdf

Funnily enough, it actually has been used to transport boxes of print -
ten boxes, 100 kg "quite happily".

I should add that i'm not seriously suggesting you replace vans with
bikes; i'm just interested in working out to what extent bikes could
replace motor vehicles for goods traffic in a real-world situation.

Also, bear in mind that the OP was only proposing closing one route to
cars; all you'd really have to do was pile everything into a hand-cart and
wheel it a few hundred metres to the nearest motor-accessible road!

tom

--
A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a
simple system that worked. -- Gall's Law