The COVID-19 pandemic saw consumers everywhere shift to shopping online, with food and goods arriving on their doorstep at the click of a mouse or tap of a screen. But behind the scenes of this convenience is a mind-bogglingly large fleet of delivery vehicles, the rapid expansion of which is affecting traffic congestion, pollution, and safety as vans compete with other road users for road capacity—and crucially—space at the kerb. Even before the pandemic, a quiet revolution in purchasing habits was already underway. Between 2014 and 2019, parcel delivery volume in the United States grew by around a billion packages per year. But 2020 saw this figure grow by a whopping five billion packages, accelerating ecommerce adoption by over five years — a trend which experts project will continue to grow. The impacts of this explosion are being felt deeply in the 'last mile' of goods delivery: the phase of the supply chain in which goods are transported to their final destination, like a customer’s home. Dense urban areas are particularly feeling the squeeze, since space is at a premium and there is no room to expand, leading shipping carriers to pay millions of dollars in parking fines each year as a part of the cost of doing business. Delivery drivers often draw ire for blocking traffic, but research shows they try to avoid doing so when possible. The research, which analysed 622 Reddit comments by delivery drivers (mostly delivering for Amazon), shows a cohort who worry daily about their safety and livelihood. As one driver said: “99 [percent] of the drivers I know will only block traffic if there is absolutely no other option.”
Instead, drivers described trying to stick to tight delivery schedules while navigating limited parking, traffic, and other factors (like accessing apartment buildings) eat up valuable time. Drivers devised strategies to address these challenges, most commonly discussed being the use of unauthorised spaces, even as they do not relish the practice. To be clear, this does not mean drivers parked illegally most of the time, but rather they were concerned they sometimes had to. One driver told of how “many times [they] are forced to park illegally … which obviously is not right and feels horrible”.
The most discussed types of unauthorised parking included parking on the wrong side of the street, blocking the road, using a no parking zone, and parking on a footpath or kerb. In turn, the main reasons for these behaviours were there was nowhere else to park, it would take too long to find an authorised space, and parking legally would require drivers to engage in unsafe behaviour, like crossing through traffic on a busy street.
