[btrettel]

This does not surprise me much. I think it comes down to incentives. The package handlers only have a certain amount of time per package. There are few if any consequences for being rough, and it saves time, so of course the package handlers end up being rough.

This isn't the only time you see this sort of selfish behavior from delivery companies. As a cyclist I commonly encounter delivery trucks parked in the bike lane. This is a common problem: http://upshatescyclists.com/

If you call UPS or Fedex you'll often hear things like "This shouldn't happen." But the drivers are basically incentivized to break the law, regardless of "company policy". They don't have much time per package, so if blocking a bike lane saves them 10 seconds, they don't care if it is really dangerous for others.

Given this knowledge, I hypothesized that an effective way to make a delivery driver avoid the bike lane would be to slow them down if they park in the bike lane. I did once try to block a UPS driver from exiting their vehicle as a test. I recall that I said something like "You're blocking me, so I'm blocking you. You can park over there if you want a legal spot."

It wasn't the worst reaction I've seen from a UPS driver, but it was among the worst. Not recommended, but if enough cyclists did this then I suspect delivery drivers would start to avoid the bike lane.

[reaperducer]

the drivers are basically incentivized to break the law

When a delivery company has a line item in its budget to cover parking tickets as a cost of doing business, it's already decided at the corporate level to disregard the law in favor of making a profit.

[hyperman1]

I remember how a few years ago a company paid a speeding ticket for one of the workers, and was promptly fined itself for contempt of court. Judge summoned the manager who approved the expense to court, gave him an earful, and told them in no uncertain terms that if they tried that again, contempt of court fines would go up until they stopped this. The ideas was the whole point of the ticket was to punish the driver, so if a company removes the punishment, they were actively sabotaging a legal punishment.

[user5994461]

How the fuck can you expect people to drive 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and never get a fine?

[jandrese]

It's not the driving, it's the parking. You're asking people to find a parking spot in the middle of the city hundreds of times a day, and no shit the spots just don't exist. Either they break the law or the packages don't get delivered.

Some cities have dedicated package delivery spots which help, but that's far from universal and sometimes regular drivers will abuse them. Also, they may not be located near the location the package needs to be delivered.

[dsfyu404ed]

The people writing, enforcing and interpreting the laws don't care if the law is unfair or impossible to reasonably comply with. That is miles outside the scope of what they do.

Laws that penalize behavior that normal people frequently engage in don't get changed until the people who write the laws get bitten by them (which rarely happens for reasons outside the scope of this comment).

[FiveSquared]

Including VHS and DVD rental pricacy.

http://mroche.umwblogs.org/history-of-the-vhs/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

[jakobegger]

By being careful? It's their fucking job!

[reaperducer]

How the fuck can you expect people to drive 8 hours a day, 5 days a week and never get a fine?

I drove for Uber 11 hours a day six days a week for 10 months and never got a fine.

[daveFNbuck]

Suppose we don't expect that. Does it change who should pay the fine?

[eridius]

That's cute, but wrong. Even the most law-abiding delivery company is going to end up with some parking tickets, so it makes sense to budget for them.

You may as well decry the budgeting for legal as saying the company wants to break the law.

[chrisseaton]

> Even the most law-abiding delivery company is going to end up with some parking tickets

Why? If you don’t park illegally you don’t get tickets. They aren’t random or accidental.

[icebraining]

Shit happens; signs are confusing, drivers make mistakes, cops make mistakes. And that may be a once in a lifetime event for a regular driver, but when you have thousands of drivers parking dozens of times a day, "once in a lifetime" becomes "once a week".

[ricardobeat]

Except very special and rare situations, the driver should be personally liable for a ticket even if on the job. Traffic laws apply to individual drivers and not vehicle owners or contractors.

[rootusrootus]

Parking tickets are not moving violations, and are typically assigned to the car, not to the driver, for obvious reasons.

[rwmj]

I have a friend who works as a driver (merchandising, not delivery) and he personally pays for his parking tickets. This is in the UK though, maybe things are different in the US.

[pointytrees]

My brother-in-law lives in LA, and parks there every day. He honestly tries not to get parking tickets, but he's been towed once or twice because the street wasn't clear. I know he isn't intentionally trying to break the law. I also got a parking ticket when visiting once. I very carefully looked at the signs, there were 2 other cars on that side of the street. I parked there, and went into visit thinking I was fine. I got back to a parking ticket, and looked at the sign again, and had Monday/Tuesday mixed up. I didn't intend to break the law. It is accidental.

[jimmaswell]

I get the impression LA and others do this on purpose as a revenue tactic.

[ravenstine]

Last I looked up, the city of LA makes somewhere around 200 million a year on parking fines alone. There's tons of places in LA where it appears safe to park, but then you come back to find a ticket on your windshield because there's a sign way off in the distance and obscured by a tree. Parking enforcement "officers" are specifically told to never make exceptions, and their little ticket machines are designed so that, once your license plate is entered, the action can't be undone and they are forced to complete the ticket in order to continue doing their job.

[dragonwriter]

> Why? If you don’t park illegally you don’t get tickets.

Incorrect; if you don't park illegally, you are less likely to be ticketed each time you park.

On an individual scale, this might result in never getting a ticket, on a large delivery company’s scale, it's pretty much guaranteed not to.

[closeparen]

In a crowded urban neighborhood, there is not going to be anywhere for a delivery vehicle to legally stop. Unless the delivery company refuses to service the area, it’s going to do some double parking.

Downtowns address this problem with yellow commercial loading zones but those don’t really exist in residential neighborhoods.

[MikeTheGreat]

The companies could also hire a second person to actually run the deliveries inside while the driver makes sure not to block traffic.

It'll cost more than the current situation, sure, but it is an option.

[Operyl]

This happens during busy times of year, like Christmas.

[rightbyte]

Ye. Service vehicles usually are exempted from the actual parking rules in practice. A sewage utility vehicle wont get ticketed if it has a pipe going down a adjacent drain and has the wheels on the sidewalk etc.

Walking from a free parking spot to the delivery location is not included in the price. Unless all delivery companies are forced to follow the parking laws (for real) at the same time they will just go out of business.

The problem is that the end user don't know what quality of delivery they will get, so they choose the cheapest, and there is a race to the bottom, like flight tickets.

When comparing prices the end user doesn't know that they might be beaten off the plane by security to make room for a business class late arrival end user, so the risk is not priced in correctly ...

[pofilat]

Surely that sewage pump operator obtained a permit to block the street that day?

[komali2]

Then, the delivery trucks shouldn't be parking there. Clear a spot and turn it into commercial parking only, i say. They're doing this right now on Polk street and it's so much safer for bicyclists on the portions that have this now.

[jimmaswell]

A short detour on a sidewalk or grass/dirt shoulder doesn't seem that dangerous to me. Does it happen much that there's no room on the right and the cyclist has to go around the left of the truck?

[closeparen]

Would you do this to every block in the Sunset?

[gpm]

If you can't operate legally, that doesn't mean you get to break the law, that means you stop operating.

[closeparen]

So start having internet retailers and takeout restaurants say “we don’t serve your street because it has a bike lane” and see how the long the bike lane lasts.

[chrisseaton]

> there is not going to be anywhere for a delivery vehicle to legally stop

So they shouldn’t stop there then. Deliver the last mile on foot or using a cart. If it’s too large for that I guess you can get some kind of permit like they do for construction.

[dahfizz]

If you park millions of trucks perfectly legally across the country, you will almost certainly get erroneous tickets. Traffic wardens are not infallible - that's why we have traffic court.

[stordoff]

Mistakes happen. My grandparents got one because the sign was a good 50m away (a long way for a disabled driver) and looked like it was referring to another part of the road, and my mother got one when she stopped for 20s to pick me up from somewhere (yes there was a sign, but she hadn't even been stopped long enough to read it).

[sowbug]

Parking violations usually don't require proof of intent. So unless you believe people never make mistakes and are always fully knowledgeable about parking rules, then tickets are sometimes random (or at least capricious) and accidental.

[ascar]

The GP was talking about a delivery company budgeting for tickets. All the answers to the parent miss the point. The discussion is on a large scale with a significant amount of tickets. If it's a hundred tickets for 1,000 drivers a year, that's a few thousand bucks for a multi-million dollar salary. Doesn't something like that run under miscellaneous and isn't explicitly budgeted for?

[pofilat]

If they don't budget it, then is shows that they don't care about parking tickets at all, they just pay whatever. Budgeting it shows they are tracking tickets which is a necessary component of reducing ticket counts.

Rhetoric is fun; it's easy to prove both a proposition and its opposite.

[xbmcuser]

You should watch a few episodes of caught in providence on youtube. Shows how traffic tickets can be given out wrongly or some laws are simply too hard to follow.

[jon-wood]

I used to work for a delivery company on the software side. Our drivers were responsible for paying their own tickets, and there’d still be one or two a month.

[amptorn]

> You may as well decry the budgeting for legal as saying the company wants to break the law.

The only reason to have a lawyer is because you broke the law, got it.

[james_s_tayler]

Sure, but nothing precludes it from actually being the case that they really do operate that way. They can even mount your defense! It's perfect.

[danellis]

"You may as well decry the budgeting for legal as saying the company wants to break the law."

Why? Doing everything correctly and within the law costs money.

[Judgmentality]

Don't the parking tickets have to be paid by the driver though, and not the company? FedEx doesn't even own their delivery trucks, the drivers do.

[xfitm3]

Parking tickets are against the registered owner. Moving violations are against the driver.

[Judgmentality]

So in the cases where the drivers don't own the delivery vehicles, just deduct the fines from whoever was driving it at the time of the ticket.

I admittedly have no idea how these situations are handled by accounting, but that seems like it would be the solution to me.

[ascar]

The solution is the company just pays the ticket. End of story.

[jon-wood]

It depends on the company. The one I worked for (although not as a driver) the drivers were responsible for all tickets, traffic or parking. Other companies will swallow the cost, sometimes to a ridiculous degree, such as the London borough where Tesco racked up £75,000 worth of parking tickets in a year for delivery trucks dropping at their branches. https://www.hamhigh.co.uk/news/environment/75-000-parking-fi...

[xfitm3]

In Manhattan every UPS driver gets tickets except when buildings have commercial parking. Nobody cares. They hire a law firm to settle on $0.25/$1 and it’s done. Meter maid makes quota, lawyers paid, city gets money.

[jobigoud]

And GDP increases. Beautiful.

[c3534l]

Every company is required by GAAP to estimate and accrue legal liability they encounter in the course of doing business. You've managed to turn actually following the law into a conspiracy to violate it.

[BurningFrog]

This is also completely planned for by the cities, who rely on that very substantial parking ticket income.

If the city wanted to make delivering parcels legally and safe for bicyclists practical, it could. But that would mean drastically lower income. So it doesn't.

[drpantzo]

So make their parking tickets more expensive.

[newnewpdro]

What successful company doesn't disregard relevant laws when the returns outweigh the penalties?

It's obvious, this is how businesses operate.

[rootusrootus]

That's how people operate, not just businesses.

[newnewpdro]

Some people, this depends hugely on the culture/upbringing of the individual. For-profit corporations on the other hand are arguably psychopathic by definition.

[rootusrootus]

Sure, there are certainly exceptions. About 10%

[danilocesar]

Honestly, I think the truck drivers are also a victim of this system. They have to deliver what's handled to them in a tight schedule. Often breaking some rules and sometimes being rude on trafic is the way they found to meet the requirements and don't get punished.

I'm shure they could avoid doing a lot of those things, but blaming and punishing the truck driver is not fair.

[btrettel]

I recognize this and am sympathetic. Ultimately changes need to come from management.

But parking in the bike lane is not necessary a large fraction of the time. I always point out a convenient alternative parking spot when talking to drivers parked in the bike lane. It's not uncommon that the alternative spot is really no worse than the bike lane for the delivery driver. The problem seems to be that many drivers don't consider more than the most obvious parking spot, and that often ends up being the bike lane.

Also, don't underestimate the number of delivery drivers who hate cyclists and intentionally block the bike lane. Having talked to dozens of delivery drivers I can say some of them seem to genuinely hate cyclists.

[sutterbomb]

I can’t imagine a world where I’ve spoken with dozens of delivery drivers.

[btrettel]

If you cycle for transportation, you'll readily encounter delivery truck drivers parked in your lane. If you drive you probably aren't paying attention to this problem and underestimate its frequency.

[kenneth]

How do you block a UPS driver from getting out of his truck with just a bicycle?

[btrettel]

I stood directly in front of the side door with my bike in front of me, leaving perhaps a 1 or 2 foot gap between my bike and the delivery vehicle. I only blocked their typical exit, i.e., the exit bordering the sidewalk. The driver could have walked into traffic. They expect me to go into traffic, so it seems only fair for them to have to exit that way. Funny thing was that the driver seemed uninterested in exiting that way...

As I recall the driver went through the small gap I left, though not without getting fairly irritated.

[fhe]

can't wait for self-driving vehicles

[joejerryronnie]

Then we can complain about anti-cyclist algorithmic bias when autonomous delivery vehicles still park in bike lanes.

[joejerryronnie]

I guarantee more cyclists break the law than delivery drivers. Would you suggest I immediately pull my truck in front of every cyclist I see blow through a stop sign?

[btrettel]

No. Brake checking people is dangerous and illegal. What I did is neither.

[closeparen]

Any neighborhood with fully saturated street parking should probably just be off limits to delivery businesses, since every transaction is going to involve an illegal stop. If your street has a bike lane, Amazon should be fined for accepting your order. Bike lanes and delivery/pickup/drop off are fundamentally incompatible street uses and that’s not going to be solved by ticketing one violation at a time.