Great Western Coffee Shop

Cities ... and concerns at the number of delivery trucks / vans / lorries running around.

A suggestion made at the recent Bath consultation briefing that buses might carry containers on top, for parcels then distributued on cargo bikes around the town was met with - let's describe it - as a robust rejection from a bus operator representative who was at the meeting, citing it slowing down services where time taken for the journey is already an issue, safety concerns as to the contents of parcels, and the scheme probably being limited to single deck buses.

I went looking for a picture of luggage on a bus - thinking of seeing examples from "far far away" and indeed I came up with a few - but many with people as well as people on the roof, and seemingly all images that require a license to be purchased to use.  So - tough - you would just have to read it here.  UNTIL ...

I came across some pictures of the West London Air terminal and Routemaster transfers to Heathrow, pulling enclosed luggage trailers - which ran for a number of years. Articles suggest that Heathrow was hard to reach by public transport (until the Piccadilly line opened there) and that the London checkin was popular - looks like the trailers worked well.  I am also minded of mixed trains and postbuses ... and I think passenger aircraft may carry some cargo. You hear (or heared) of small numbers of passengers on long distance shipping, ferries convey a mix (thinking of places like Rosslare and Liverpool too, where teams of road-tugs load containers), and small island services from Lundy to Tristan da Cuna are distinctly mixed.


Is there any mileage (or kilometerage) in combining parcel / freight and passenger transport into the future? Strategic hubs on the outskirts of towns and cities (or freightliner yard) where a 40 foot container is plopped on top of a bus prior to its first run in of the day, to be detached onto a city centre or local hub frame for distribution and refilling during the day, when the procedure will be reversed?

Images - Wikipedia Creative Commons (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_train#/media/File:Hzl_MAN-VT_PmG.jpg)

Passenger aircraft almost always carry cargo in the hold. It's less subject to fluctuations than passengers. (And in the Early Pandemic Era they were filling the entire hold and the passenger cabin with cargo.)

IMHO, lightly used rural bus services could deliver parcels to a local shop or pub from which the user may collect them. A bus that calls at several small villages could deliver parcels with minimal delay, at low cost, and insignificant extra fuel useage.

In urban areas, the early morning and less busy bus could deliver parcels in bulk  for onward last mile delivery by cargo bike.

Could they do so competitively with UPS, Amazon, etc?

Amazon use a whole lot of different companies to ship and if this (new) service delivered for them they might pick it up and start using it too - probably would, since it would get them green brownie points.

UPS are a shipping company (Amazon lists them as one of the ones they use) and the might combine, subcontract, complete, co-operate or run the new system ...

"Competitively" is an interesting element - what is the cost of shipping, and are costs going to rise based on the carbon footprint of the mode of transport used?

So, was that the kind of meeting where people can't wait to dive into the toy cupboard and start making new buses out of Lego? I think anyone responsible for transport or delivery services might start from a different place, and never reach the design-a-bus stage. Things like what do you gain by sharing versus two separate vehicles - noting that most urban buses have very demanding requirements on where and when they take people and how they enable them to use the bus.

Of course rural buses did carry parcels once, so you'd need to ask why they don't now. I suspect the inflexibility of our model with local government commissioning/franchising services may be important here - we don't do interagency very well. In some countries local government can do anything and everything as a general coordinator and enabler; ours have rigid limits on the functions. But the question as posed was about city centres, where the problem is not sparsity of people by density of vehicles.

One key concept is the "carrier's carrier", meaning the carrier contracted by the sender hands over to another agent for final delivery. That raises issues of "who they?" - notably in such areas as "they didn't deliver". Customers already struggle at times to know whether that "they" was the seller or carrier, and now there's a deliverer too. Obviously these can be seen as legal liability and branding/reputation issues too.

Here, for the buses, it would surely be transfer for very local delivery - but by whom? Would the carrier have someone there? Hardly. So there would already be a "carrier's deliverer", and the bus would replace one leg that would otherwise be provided by that deliverer. And add a fourth carrier! I think not.

As it happens, there is a carrier's carrier at both extremes of the population density scale (and both run by Menzies). In the Scottish highlands and islands Menzies provide a grouped road delivery service, where other carriers would have to commit a vehicle to take the odd parcel or two. In central London Gnewt uses electric vans, bikes, and porters (on foot) in various combinations. But in between, it seems the cost pressures are not extreme enough to push providers into doing this. Gnewt have been talking about expanding to other cities, but AFAICS have not yet moved.

Here is a quote from a 2020 paper looking at how and if this model might spread (here in preprint): "Collaborative Parcels Logistics via the Carrier’s Carrier Operating Model" (https://westminsterresearch.westminster.ac.uk/download/0992d7348f70856834c1ef1035290b109eb2f517bd50ac01f2002585d86cd8bd/1584928/TRR%20paper_final_submission.pdf)


But as to the original question, about using city-centre buses? No, that's a silly idea. Go-ahead did announce in 2017 they were talking to "logistics companies" (https://www.retailgazette.co.uk/blog/2017/11/amazon-buses-london-delivery/).  I'm not sure that's the same as carriers - or couriers - and in any case it seems to have led nowhere.

It’s hardly worth posting this after Stuving’s excellent reply, but I was writing it whist he was posting!

I’ve been wondering all day whether to respond to this thread and, if so, how not to turn my reply into one of my “war and Peace” style posts that few people would read anyway

After spending a lot of my working life taking other people’s “good ideas” and looking into the practicalities of how they might be implemented, my thoughts went into overdrive on this. To save a lot of typing I will just pose the questions I asked myself and not the answers. Perhaps others might have a few views:

How do you get a consignment of anything of any weight on or off the roof of a bus without lifting gear or fork lift truck? Even lightweight things would need a ladder of some sort.

Who would actually want to use such a service? The major retail outlets already have their own distribution network and are hardly likely to send tomorrow’s food consignment for Tesco on the top of the X31...

What does a “cargo bike” look like? I have a vision of Granville and “Open All Hours” here. Presumably we’ve moved on but what to? There is limited weight you can add to a two or three wheeled vehicle before it becomes unstable, and little more that you can add to a trailer before it becomes physically impossible for a human to actually move it – especially uphill.

How many of these “cargo bikers” would you need in a city the size of Bristol or Bath (let alone London) and who would be paying their wages?

Would there be sufficient work to keep someone gainfully employed all day in smaller places like, say, Devizes or Dursley?

There are of course plenty more. But finally this was actually done in the UK many years ago in the days before Hermes, DPD and all the rest. Here is an extract from the Terms and Conditions of Carriage that were printed in a 1963/64 Bristol Omnibus Company timetable. Of course, they had conductors back then who could look after these things, but even then they wouldn’t touch parcels on city and express services with a barge pole. There must have been good reasons for that, and probably not just upsetting the unions.

Another ‘good idea on paper, largely impractical in practice’ idea.

However, might the idea of reviving rail as a distribution network be worth considering?

There's a lot of "click and collect" business - could our manned stations become collection points, thereby subsidising them being staffed? Train managers could be retrained to include parcel handling in their job (especially on off peak services) and lockable parcel storage installed in our train carriages (especially as there's a growing consensus that passenger numbers may never recover to pre-Covid levels, so the loss of a little on-board space may not be such a sacrifice) so that parcels can be dropped and collected for a new source of revenue.

Much more likely to be practical than buses? Discuss..........

I was thinking not of competing with existing delivery services, but of the bus operator acting as an agent or subcontractor to existing suppliers, in the more remote parts of the UK.
A lightly used local bus could easily drop off half a dozen packages to the local pub.

Quite a few stations already have this facility in the form of Amazon collection lockers.  Even some small unstaffed stations - I noted one at tiny Grindleford station on the Hope Valley line last year. 

All automated of course.

Wokingham is one of those - though I can't remember whose name is on (but not Amazon's).

I think we need to decide whether this is a city proposition or a rural one.

IMO it's far more practical in sparsely populated areas. The Scottish Highlands have already been mentioned by Stuving, and other examples can be found in Sweden, Finland, some parts of the Alps, the Australian outback. In some cases these are more lorries with a few seats than buses that carry parcels. In cities you'd have far more problems of capacity, timetabling and a general lack of need; there already are distribution services.

And as for cargo bikes and delivery riders: Deliveroo is the obvious one! For larger parcels there is eg: https://www.facebook.com/CoopCycleBristol/ (sorry for the Facebook link but they don't seem to have an actual website). They obviously can't carry a couple of tons like a van, but for individual parcels in city centres they seem to be competitive on cost and time. And in Indian cities cycle rickshaw is the standard way to deliver furniture, so maximum weights are more than you might think.

I do have to wonder if containers of parcels could arrive at (say) Bristol Temple Meads on long distance trains and go into a sorting area just off the platforms / main station for delivery within the city on cycles and even on foot, with those local delivery people bringing the parcels back in for departure on later trains, again having sorted them depending on where they are going.   Perhaps one of the carrier businesses around would like to add this to their repertoire - perhaps the Royal Mail who already have some experience of very local delivery might like to rise up to this new challenge  :D

You could build a sorting office just next to the station with connections to the platforms...... Oh - Perhaps not just like the one they just demolished! :D

There's been a lot of official output on this and like subjects lately. Not only was the CCC at it, but there was a researchy one (it says "this document is not a statement of government policy" on every page) called "A time of unprecedented change in the transport system: The Future of Mobility (https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwiTtqGh9OLuAhVzwuYKHValAXsQFjAAegQIBRAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fassets.publishing.service.gov.uk%2Fgovernment%2Fuploads%2Fsystem%2Fuploads%2Fattachment_data%2Ffile%2F780868%2Ffuture_of_mobility_final.pdf&usg=AOvVaw2vhTiBa_-Yp5uG8dTuG7qn)". That was from the Government Office for Science (the what?) in January 2019, doing roughly:

I think you should read "last mile" literally there - you still need something else for the next-to-last-three miles, ten miles, or whatever it is from the main depot.

More applicable, the National Infrastructure Commission published "Better Delivery: the challenge for freight (https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwj7xMOF9OLuAhWxaRUIHZABC70QFjAAegQIARAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nic.org.uk%2Fpublications%2Fbetter-delivery-the-challenge-for-freight%2F&usg=AOvVaw3ZFsgpJ_F2qiZ8HCmAAGhR)" - their Freight Study final report - in April 2019. That looks at the whole of freight, so delivery - in the "where's my Amazon goodies" sense - is only a small part of it. I can't see any mention of that sharing with buses, but it does come out in favour of the "cooperative urban consolidation centre".

For non-believers in the cargo bike (whether traditional or e-) it says:

Basically, having studied the alternatives, it concludes:

E-vans, obviously.

The OP was about Bath, which isn't big enough to be the next target for Gnewt or the like. However, I did spot this in the NIC report:

BaNES does appear to have something of that name already, but too old to be the one NIC is referring to, and I guess that should be about the city per se.

In my ideal world,maybe the West somerset railway could have a scheme that small vans with small items COULD  drop off their parcel/s for Minehead only.
Then(the WSR) charge a nominal fee for taking the parcel/s to Minehead central which would be picked up by those who it was addressed to.
The distance from  from Norton Fitzwarren to Minehead is 22 miles,and the round trip has got to be two hours.

Can I be in the room when you run that one past the RMT please?  ;)

By "container" are you referring to an ISO container, which would have to arrive on a goods train, or a pallet load of parcels, which could be transported in a guards van (if such things still existed – or could be reintroduced)?

Strike bruvvers STRIKE and on IETs we demand a properly trained parcel handler in each portion, AND a train manager.