Postal Service & the USPS

For the purposes of this post, mail delivery refers to postal service, which is the delivery of written documents and small packages.  The exact role and function of a postal service varies by country, and a postal service can be private or public.  In most countries, the role of postal services has evolved and changed significantly over time, but in many cases, the postal service is a government entity, while there are often parcel carriers that are privately owned, which may or may not compete with the postal service.

In the United States, the United States Postal Service (USPS) is the agency responsible for delivering standard mail.  USPS is the second largest non-military employer – behind Wal-Mart – in the U.S., and it operates the largest civilian vehicle fleet in the world, with approximately 260,000 vehicles (but far fewer bicycles than I would like!).  Despite the huge fleet of vehicles – or maybe because of them – USPS has a strong history of environmental stewardship.  They participate in a number of environmental and sustainability programs, work to minimize the number of vehicle miles traveled throughout the fleet, and utilize alternative fuels.  Although, I will argue they could significantly expand their relatively tiny use of bicycles!

Bicycle Mail Delivery History

I am going to focus mainly on bicycle mail delivery history in the U.S., but if anyone has links or resources about bicycle mail delivery history in other countries, please feel free to send them our way.  For the most part, early bicycle mail delivery history mirrors bicycle history in general, so it is safe to say bicycle mail became an option for postal workers who delivered by foot or horseback in the late 1800’s as bicycle use became more common in many places.

The first instance of bicycle mail delivery in the U.S. is tied closely to the Pullman Strike of 1984, during which there was a major conflict between railroad workers and labor unions that resulted in a nearly half of the traffic being shut down throughout the country.  One of the major implications of the strike was the suspension of mail service between many cities.  According to Stampnotes and Messengers.org, in Fresno, California, which was able to receive mail but not send it back out to other cities in California such as San Francisco, a representative from Victor Bicycles suggested that a relay of bicycles between the cities be instituted to carry the mail.  Special stamps were quickly created and a mail service created that transported mail and other small items by bike between Fresno and San Francisco.

Image Source: Messengers.org

The distance between Fresno and San Francisco is approximately 200 miles, and the mail was carried between the two cities in relays by different riders who had to cover anywhere between 15 to 60 miles.  The cost of the service was $0.25, and some riders also carried other items that needed to be delivered.  The last run was made by a single rider – as the other riders were need to help quell the striking railroad workers – and he did the ride in 2 days using a fixed gear with a rather tough gear ratio.

Image Source: Messengers.org

Stampnotes also mentions that Australia is also known for its history of bicycle mail delivery.  The Coolgardie Cycle Express was created due to the discovery of gold, which resulted in a sudden and booming population in and around Coolgardie, Australia in the 1890’s.  The Cycle Express was created to help carry messages and mail around the goldfields.

Image Source: Global Auction House

Bicycle mail services were also operated in South Africa, France, Switzerland, and Italy throughout the first half of the 1900’s, especially during World War I and II, but by the 1930’s most countries had replaced bicycle mail service with automobile mail service.

Modern Bicycle Mail Services

Today, bicycle mail services exist somewhat intermittently throughout many countries.  In the United States, the USPS delivers mail by bike in only three places – Sun City, Arizona, St. Petersburg, Florida, and Miami Beach, Florida.  According to USPS:

Sun City, AZ, carriers delivering by bicycle conserve 7,800 gallons of gasoline annually compared to Long Life Vehicle delivery and eliminate 25,000 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions. All Sun City carriers with bike routes received new wheels in November of 2007. Sun City, AZ, Postmaster Mark Strong said, “Now our red, white and blue fleet of bicycles is delivering green.”

Bicycle mail carriers in the U.S. speak highly of the bicycle mail program, despite the fact that they have to occasionally deliver mail in the rain and elements.

“Just riding, with the wind blowing, it’s nice,” said Jackie Genes, 44, who has worked out of the Open Air Station for 14 years.  – St. Petersburg Times

Bicycle mail is relatively commonplace in countries like New Zealand, the UK, Germany, Denmark, France, among others.  In New Zealand, the Postie is a common sight delivering mail in their bright yellow and red shirts, and nearly 80% of NZ Posties use bicycles for their primary delivery mode.

Image Source: Examiner.com

In the United Kingdom, the Royal Mail Service has been a common site throughout many cities, delivering mail on Pashley Mailstar bikes.  Unfortunately, the Royal Mail Service – in what has been called a time-saving effort – has plans to phase out nearly 25,000 postal bikes in favor of trolleys and other vehicles.  However, as Treehugger points out, that means that there will be nearly 25,000 Pashley Mailstars hitting the UK marketplace.

For the most part, it appears that bicycle mail service is rather uncommon in many places.  Fortunately, this means there is a great potential to increase the use of bicycles for delivering mail in many places, which saves money, reduces traffic congestion, increases postal worker health, builds a sense of community, and is generally good for the planet.

]]> http://www.utilitycycling.org/2009/12/mail-delivery-by-bike/feed/ 1 http://www.utilitycycling.org/2009/11/parcel-delivery-by-bike/ http://www.utilitycycling.org/2009/11/parcel-delivery-by-bike/#comments Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:13:14 +0000 Melanie Meyers http://www.utilitycycling.org/?p=1395 Streetsblog recently posted a request for photos of bikes at work.  The result is an exceptional slide show of bikes and people completing a wide assortment of activities from hauling trash and water to delivering packages to cruising to the beach with a surfboard and much more.  The photos are from all around the world, which indicates the global appeal and utility of using bicycles to accomplish a wide range of tasks.

Utility Cycling sent in a photo (the header photo in this post) from one of our sister sites – Bike Trailer Blog – of the crew at Bike Trailer Shop picking up trash and recycling for Earth Day in Flagstaff, AZ, in 2008.  You can read more about that trash-hauling extravaganza here.

Bicycle Delivery

The Streetsblog slide show inspired me to return to the category of bicycle delivery for our next post.  In our first post at Utility Cycling, we began to define utility cycling and all of the different categories of utility cycling practice.  Naturally, bicycle delivery is one of the most important categories of utility cycling.  Bicycle delivery encompasses a wide range of activities, but most simply, it means using a bicycle to deliver a good.  For the most part, bicycle delivery is a wide-open category, and there is a ton of potential for bicycle delivery activities.

The wide range of activities that can be done in the bicycle delivery category are mainly dictated by the types of goods being delivered.  Bicycle deliveries can range from important paperwork to small-medium sized parcels to take-out or pizza to large parcels and even furniture.  The potential for bicycle delivery is mediated by the equipment being used for the delivery.  Paperwork and small packages may only require the delivery person to use a bag, while on the other hand, large parcels might require a bicycle cargo trailer and furniture or large cargo might require a freight bicycle or heavy duty trailer.

This brings me to the subcategory of bicycle delivery – parcel delivery.  Parcel delivery, as I am conceptualizing it, mainly refers to delivering small to medium-sized packages by bicycle.  For the most part, this type of delivery is done by small courier businesses, which generally operate within a specific geographic area (usually a city and perhaps somewhat beyond).  There are businesses like these all over the world, from Dublin, Ireland, to Bend, Oregon, and many places in between.  It is quite uncommon, in the U.S., anyways, to hear of a large corporate delivery company using bicycles to make deliveries.  That is, until last year, when UPS started doing exactly that.

UPS Bike Delivery

Bicycle delivery is an important form of commercial cycling (i.e. making money by bicycle), which you can learn more about in the book Cycling for a Profit: How to Make a Living With Your Bike by Jim Gregory.  When I tend to think of commercial cycling, I tend to think of small businesses and start-up companies.  However, my assumptions have been proven wrong – to some degree – by the United Parcel Service (UPS).

In what was largely characterized as a money-saving move, last winter, UPS added a fleet of cyclists throughout Oregon and southwest Washington to deliver small parcels and goods by bike.  This video from Pacific Pedaling shares the story from one UPS rider’s perspective.

UPS purchased a fleet of bicycles, trailers, and safety gear and sent a handful of riders on their merry way to deliver packages.  Many riders managed to deliver quite a few more packages than the 25-50 packages per day they were expected to be able to deliver.  Despite the fact that UPS trucks can deliver nearly 150 packages per day, UPS estimates that the cost savings is somewhere in the realm of $38,000 in fuel and repair costs for every three cyclists.  And the response from people receiving the packages was overwhelmingly positive.

Interestingly enough, UPS has its roots in cycling.  The company was originally founded by some commercial cyclists in 1907, and many of the initial deliveries were made by foot or bicycle.  Nowadays, UPS can generally be spotted by the big, brown trailers that cruise around town, but in some ways, the holiday bicycle delivery is coming full circle.  I sure hope to hear about UPS doing this again in 2009 and not just for the holidays.  It sounds like the savings incurred by the company were substantial, so why not do it more throughout the year?  I would imagine that with a little organization and foresight, a strategic model could be put into place for UPS and other large delivery companies such as FedEx, DHL, and others to use bicycles.

• Couriers/ Messengers: Many cycling enthusiasts are somewhat enthralled with the elusive bicycle messenger, who zips through traffic bearing important documents, photos, objects, and anything else that cannot be sent digitally.  Bicycle messengers are iconic symbols of bicycling culture in many places, but also play a very important role for many businesses.  Bicycle couriers can also be seen carting bike trailers or riding long-tail bikes full of various goods from recycling to packages.
• Food/ Pizza Delivery: Bicycles are a great way to deliver food or set up mobile eateries, especially in crowded urban environments, where car deliveries can be time consuming, expensive, or infeasible.
• Mail Delivery: Although not as common as it used to be, delivering mail by bicycle can be efficient in places where a mail truck can’t easily find parking or pull up next to buildings.
• Parcel Delivery (UPS & FedEx): Though this may be a  less obvious (or perhaps more remarkable) category of utility cycling, it is important to note that the bicycle is a great way to deliver mail and packages.
• Freight Delivery: Believe it or not, you can even use a bicycle to move an entire household.  This sort of operation would likely be much easier with freight bicycles, however
• Factory/ Parts Delivery: Bicycles can be used to transport parts within large industrial or commercial environments such as factories, where they are useful as are often safer than motorized delivery methods, or even within large resorts and hotels, where they can be used to transport dirty dishes and linens to central cleaning areas.

Bicycle delivery is one of the richest categories of utility cycling, and there are loads of different aspects of bicycle delivery about which we plan to write.  But before we do so, we want to look at the category of bicycle delivery broadly.  Specifically, we want to look at some of the benefits of bicycle delivery, the history of bicycle delivery, the practice of bicycle delivery today, and the future of bicycle delivery.

Bicycle Delivery Benefits

Bicycle delivery is a much more commonplace method of delivery than many people think.  However, human-powered methods of delivery – like bicycle delivery – are much more common in the developing world, than they are in the developed world, where motorized delivery is more common.  However, bicycle delivery is often underestimated, and it has a number of important advantages over motorized delivery.  First, in urban environments, bicycle delivery reduces congestion by removing the number of cargo trucks or vans on city streets, and it also opens up parking spaces.  Second, bicycle delivery reduces air pollution and other negative environmental impacts associated with the operation of motorized vehicles.  Third, bicycle delivery is significantly cheaper than operating a fleet of motorized vehicles, both in terms of vehicle maintenance costs and fuel costs.  Forth, bicycle delivery doesn’t have to be limited to delivering goods, it can also be a great way to deliver the kids to school, for example.

However, there are some limitations to bicycle delivery, as well.  First, the range (ie. the distance that can be covered in a reasonable amount of time) of a human-powered vehicle – like a bicycle – is obviously much shorter than that of a motorized vehicle.  Second, bicycles don’t have a motor (other than the one provided by the rider’s body), so they are significantly less powerful than motorized vehicles, which means that they can’t go as far or as fast or as long.  Nor can they carry as large a load as a motorized vehicle.  Nonetheless, in many cases, delivery bicycles may be more effective than motorized vehicles.  And indeed, the most sustainable form of delivery could efficiently couple motorized and non-motorized methods to optimize the practice of delivery.

The History of Bicycle Delivery

I would like to do more in-depth research into the history of cargo bikes, as I have been disappointed with the lack of resources on the Internet.  I did find some useful time-lines about cargo bikes and Long Johns, and if you have more info, please let me know about it!  However, for now, suffice it to say that bicycle delivery has long been a useful practice for a wide variety of delivery purposes.  Cargo bikes were more common than automobiles on many streets throughout Europe and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and they were used to make deliveries of varying sorts.  But with the introduction of the automobile, bicycle delivery – much like the bicycle itself – was mostly phased out, at least in most industrialized countries.  In the more economically developed world today, the most common form of bicycle delivery is probably that done by bicycle messengers who often ride traditional two-wheeled bikes with fixed gear hubs instead of three-wheeled tricycles or long-frame cargo bikes.  However, in the developing world, bicycles are used for a wide variety of purposes from hauling loads to serving as pedicabs and much more.

The Practice of Bicycle Delivery

Today, the practice of bicycle delivery varies significantly by place and is often dictated by the cultural practices of that place.  For example, bicycle messengers are common in large cities like New York City, Boston, or San Francisco in the United States, where they also have a strong cultural presence, but they are rare in rural areas, suburbs, and most small to mid-size cities.  In Europe, cities such as Copenhagen and Amsterdam have very strong cycling cultures, where bicycle delivery, cargo bikes, and work bikes are the norm.  Meanwhile, in other cities, entrepreneurs have created bicycle courier services for local deliveries of items from groceries to recycling to parcels.

In the developing world, where bicycle delivery is much more commonplace, organizations like WorldBike are working to design and introduce more suitable bikes that can be used to haul goods and people more efficiently.  Despite the fact that bicycles are often the lifeblood of many people in poor countries, the bicycles that are available are often bikes designed for recreation, not work, hence the mission of WorldBike and other organizations is to bring more suitable delivery bicycles to poor countries.

The Future of Bicycle Delivery

There is a lot of potential for bicycle delivery to burgeon into a sustainable and lucrative practice throughout the entire world in the next century as concerns about the environment, the economy, and more start to change the way people view and practice transportation.  Bicycle delivery should not be a practice limited to poor countries, as there is plenty of opportunity for it to be extremely useful in the world’s richer countries as well.  Cargo bikes are certainly becoming more popular as of late, and I recommend that you check out this post from Bike Hugger to learn more about the different kinds of cargo bikes.

In future bicycle delivery posts, we plan to look at each of the different sub-categories we have identified above in-depth.  If you would like to suggest more subcategories or have suggestions about post ideas, we gladly welcome your comments.