Services like Doordash, Postmates, and Uber Eats have revolutionized food delivery. By letting you effectively hire a “private taxi for your burrito”, they enabled every local restaurant to reach customers in their own homes. Only, I’ve recently identified a hitch that these apps need to solve, post-haste. I’m going to do something usually forbidden in these pages—I’m calling for a ban on cars.
You’re probably thinking sounds crazy. The whole point of these services is that you can hire someone to go pickup your food and drive it to your door. Obviously, that involves a vehicle; it’s the whole basis for the service. Indeed, in Uber’s case, they established their food service when they realized they already had a bunch of people in cars that they could tell where to go.
Here’s the thing, though. There are places where cars should shudder to go. Places where the very environment strangles them, slowing them to a crawl and trapping them in byzantine loops of asphalt and misery. I talk, of course, of the city.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Cars are great in the suburbs. Your delivery driver can pull up to the restaurant, get out, and go grab your food. They can then place it neatly on their passenger seat, carrying the precious cargo to your door. They then park outside your house, stroll up to the door, drop your food on the porch, and walk away. Maybe if they’re old-fashioned they’ll knock and hand it to you, but COVID largely established this practice as unnecessary and even rude.
That scenario works just fine—but it falls apart in the city. I learned this to my peril today. While I live in a small house, I’m in a dense downtown area. It’s full of retail, tons of offices, and plenty of tasty restaurants. In some ways, it’s a dream—there are so many delicious food outlets to order from when I open up my phone. The hitch is that it’s virtually impossible to park at any of them.
This is typical in most city areas. If you have a car, you might be lucky to park within 300 feet of a given restaurant or retail outlet. Trying to find a viable park can take ages, which surely frustrates these delivery drivers to no end. They then have to walk some distance to the restaurant, and your food is cooling off, all the while. The problem is then replicated when they arrive at your home. If you don’t have street parking outside, good luck getting your food in a timely manner. Add on traffic snarls at dinner time and it only gets worse.
Today, I ordered from a sushi restaurant maybe half a mile from my home. Had I not been under the pump for blogs, I might have walked the distance in ten minutes. Regardless, this is a busy household, so I got delivery for myself and the gang. I ordered at 11:45 AM. The food was ready by 12:00 PM. It then took five full minutes for the driver to loop past the restaurant and find a park. A further five minutes passed as they drove a half mile to my house, and another five minutes again to loop the block three times finding zero parks before they stopped dead in the road to hand me my food.
There is actually a beautiful solution to this problem. It’s called the e-bike.
A great deal of food delivery is done in the inner city using these magnificent machines. They don’t get caught up in peak hour traffic jams; bicycles can glide right by. They’re more nimble, much more able to U-turn and dip and weave to take more direct routes to their target. Plus, you can “park” them anywhere.
When I typically order sushi here, it takes a mere 2 minutes to arrive from the restaurant. It’s fresher than it would be if I walked it home from the place myself. That’s because nine times out of ten, it comes by e-bike, and everyone is happier. Still, every so often, Uber Eats designates a full-sized car to haul my Japanese luncheon through the inner city, and we all suffer the consequences.
The solution is simple. All downtown food deliveries are to be handled by e-bike. Make the change today, and be my sushi’s salvation. Please. For all of us.
Image credits: DoorDash, Capwiuejooh CC BY-SA 4.0
