OwenGenius explanation of congestion and marginal trips.
Cagers, repeat after me:
"I am traffic. I am a marginal trip. I am a bad driver."
🚲Just, um, don’t let the freight operators own all the tram tracks. It’d suck to have an Amtrak situation within a city. “Tram is stuck again waiting for another freight tram…”
@dx bike messengers are the solution. There are very few things at the point of delivery that are large.
sanae 
(SF)@dx @owen I guess for nonperishables that would be USPS
I have wondered about whether home delivery is on average better than driving to the store, for those who don't live close enough to stores, and whether USPS, which has those carts and does a bit less driving, is better than private alternatives
@sanae @dx since congestion is a function of space at a specific point in time, my guess is that USPS style delivery is much more efficient than people driving to get what they need.
In the latter situation you're much more likely to have two "things" taking up twice as much space (two vehicles) at a given time than if one vehicle delivered those things at separate times.
@sanae Yeah, I think there’s a way for home delivery to be more efficient, especially in suburbs where you’re potentially consolidating tens of individual car trips into a single delivery vehicle trip.
A cursory look into this reveals the burgeoning field of “freight on transit” which seems to mostly be patents and papers at the moment, with a couple exceptions (like the Zurich trash tram).
I wonder about bespoke goods transportation too. Obviously trains within cities exist, and there have been some elaborate vacuum tube networks in small areas before. Has anyone built a network of tiny tunnels for delivery robots, for example? What wacky stuff is out there?
Dan Miller@dx If sidewalks count, there's stuff like this, although I think adoption has slowed down recently (don't quote me on that, though). https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2021/11/05/the-future-of-delivery-robots/?sh=24a148837337
The Future Of Delivery Robots
Delivery robots – just a few years ago, the stuff of pure science fiction – are now very much a reality and quickly becoming a part of everyday life for many of us. In fact, I will usually come across five or six when I go for an evening jog in my hometown of Milton Keynes, England!