[crazygringo]

I'm pretty sure online shopping dramatically reduces use of public infrastructure, i.e. roads and parking.

Every UPS truck that goes out with 100 packages means, what -- conservatively, maybe 50 separate car trips that it replaced?

And so that much less traffic, congestion, pollution, gas used, etc.

[glofish]

I am going to venture the hypothesis that people will make the same number of car trips - just to other destinations.

Similar to how building more or wider roads do not reduce congestions - more traffic takes its place.

[crazygringo]

You're right in that the, say, 20 min saved per person is going to go to some other activity.

And certainly some of those activities can involve driving, like going to visit friends. But many other activities will just be spending more time at home -- e.g. coming home straight from work instead of running errands, or staying home Saturday afternoon to read or play video games.

To your point: in areas where traffic congestion is already extreme, it may not make a difference because there's so much pent-up demand for car trips. But in most of the rest of the country (suburbs, rural, etc.) that doesn't suffer from congestion, I think package delivery would have to result in reducing traffic to some measurable degree.

[sharkmerry]

Amazon's sprinter vans that do deliveries. are 6k pounds. curb weight, can carry up to 12k pounds

so 5x road wear of normal car when unloaded. 81x the wear when fully loaded.

[crazygringo]

Well, public transportation buses typically weigh even far more than that, at 25-35K pounds, yet society seems to agree they're better overall than the 20 or 40 cars they replace, despite their greater overall road wear.

I don't think anyone considers road wear to be a major deciding factor here. Congestion and pollution are.

[sharkmerry]

I was curious to compare.

Public Transit bus weighs 44k fully loaded. Assuming only seated passengers, it holds 44 people so 1000lb per person. A car is 4000lbs on average. Fully loaded (with standing) holds 92 people. 478lb/person.

[crazygringo]

So if you’re curious, you’ll enjoy knowing road wear isn’t linear with weight — it’s exponentially proportional. Almost all road wear comes from large trucks and buses. So linear division doesn’t actually have relevance here. Buses are far, far worse than the equivalent number of cars in terms of road wear... but again, it's a non-issue because road wear isn't a main consideration.

https://www.vabike.org/vehicle-weight-and-road-damage/

[sharkmerry]

the first comment about the sprinter vans shows that its exponential for road wear. Youre arguing roadwear doesnt matter but arguing against busses.

I just wanted to see what weight per person was. Doesnt matter as much for road wear, but as you were saying, pollution etc matters too, and weight per person matters for the other factors. Not weight per axle like road wear

[jamil7]

I guess it's potentially a little more nuanced than that since people are ordering higher quantities with greater frequency.