[skybrian]

If delivery using cyclists is unsafe and they should slow down, it seems like the city has to go after the businesses that provide the incentive to speed.

Maybe enforce a minimum elapsed time and price for a delivery? If they get there sooner, they have to wait for the next job.

[dpark]

In that case they’d simply carry multiple deliveries. And no one is going to support the “delivery food must be cold” ordinance anyway.

I honestly applaud looking for more fruitful and effective areas to regulate, but in this case, I don’t think you found the appropriate target.

[skybrian]

Of course it's never going to be that simple, but it seems like you have start with incentives if you're ever going to get anywhere. Services like GrubHub gather lots of data and it could be used to improve safety, but apparently isn't?

Maybe make the services partially liable for any accidents, and they'll make some changes in their routing?

[dpark]

The incentives need to be useful though. Realistically it’s Google doing the routing anyway and cyclists ignore it when they know a faster path. GrubHub cannot reasonably fix that unless they’re going to fine delivery workers when they deviate from the route, which seems absurd given that delivery workers will legitimately deviate for faster routes that are equally safe.

Making GrubHub liable for accidents also doesn’t do much. Accidents are relatively uncommon anyway and it’s probably very affordable to just eat the cost. Plus I’m not sure how GrubHub would force safer cycling even if they were incentivized to do so.