Paraphrasing an observation I heard in a podcast some weeks ago:
We were promised little robot butlers in the scifi we read as kids, but what we got was human servants that act like robots.
It looks like you're trying to make a clever joke in the style of mocking SV types for reinventing products that have existed for generations, except you're wrong. The parent means the Amazon delivery locker kiosks they're putting in all kinds of retail stores, where you enter a code to unlock the locker with your package. It is secure from theft, has variable sizes, works 24/7 with no waiting for a clerk, and can fill the delivery needs of a neighborhood far more efficiently than apartment-style mailboxes where each resident is assigned their own small locker.
I wish that USPS would get into this service, because I'm not a fan of Amazon and package theft is rampant. It is nearly impossible to replicate the Amazon locker experience through USPS and other online retailers. If you want to order a package and pick it up at the post office, the best you can hope for is to beg the seller to send it to you via general delivery, which many do not allow. And even though renting a PO box lets you ship packages to the post office and pick them up, most retailers won't ship to PO boxes. A PO box costs about the same per year as a Prime subscription. Plus, you still have to wait in line to pick up your packages.
We should have had that in 1980. 5 'large mailboxes' for the apartment building, the postman sets the code, locks it, and leaves writes the code on a piece of paper and leaves it in your slot.
I do have that in my apartment building. But, instead of a code, the lockboxes have keys that only the postman can remove from them. He locks a package in the box, removes the key, and puts it in the recipient's box. When the recipient checks his mail, he uses the key to open the lockbox and withdraw his package. The key is then stuck in the lockbox lock and cannot be withdrawn again except by the postman.
Around here the standard protocol is to just leave packages with a neighbour (there's always someone at home) and leave a card telling where the package is.
Electronic locks with electronically delivered opening codes seems like a genuine innovation to me. It's not a fundamentally different concept, but it makes the existing one a lot more practical (e.g. consider the problem of customers stealing keys)
The problem they're trying to solve is that since so many people receive packages these days those '5 large lockable mailboxes' aren't enough anymore and packages end up getting left out in the open. Also lots of places don't have those large lockable mailboxes at all. Then package theft happens. So not so much innovation in the mailbox space than just adding more "lockable mailboxes" for people to use as needed.
You're missing the point, which is that there are simple solutions to these problems, usually systematic in nature, and 'The Silicon Valley' hasn't helped one iota in helping in this area.
They can have 10 lockers if needed. If they don't have in-wall boxes then put a physical container with a few doors.
They can use the key scheme as described below.
They can leave the package at the Grocery Store across the street, which is a pick-up centre for FedEx and UPS.
Silicon Valley is not solving these problems in any meaningful way.
Replying to my own comment - Canada Post actually has varying size lockers now, including outdoors, operated by key. They put the key for the variable size lockers in your small locker to which you have the key.
(I cannot tell if you're being sarcastic or genuine).
Yes, except (before COVID) if you were at work, and the mail carrier tried to deliver a package to your house unsuccessfully, they would take it with them again. Or they would leave it outside the house, where it could be stolen.
Then, starting the next day, you could go to the nearest pickup site (and depending on the carrier, this either means the post office, which might be a 20min walk, or a completely-out-of-town parcel distribution site, which could be a 1h15 train ride [based on my own location]) to get it.
There, you would take a number, and wait in line up to 15 minutes (because all working people would be there at that time of day).
The alternative is an automated postal box, which does not need an employee to operate it. It's just a huge wall of lockers with a central terminal. When you receive a package there, you get an electronic unlock code to unlock exactly that 1 locker with your package in it.
These postal boxes can be installed anywhere where spare space is available. Maybe that's platform 5 at your nearest train station, or outside the pharmacy in town. At least it's closer to your home, and open 24/7.
Parcel delivery is such a classic principal-agent problem; the customer contracts with a seller, who then subcontracts with a delivery company. But because there's layers in the middle the delivery companies can't compete on actual customer satisfaction, just on being cheap for the vendors.
I recently tried to find out where to buy a new mattress online. Usually I get them IKEA and that's fine, but their shipping is so expensive, it's generally only worth it if you boy a whole lot of large items at once.
I talked to the customer repo of another shop to inquire what vendor they used for shipping and what would happen if I wasn't home - and they told me they used DPD.
Turns out that DPD's "we missed you" service is "you have to go to our distribution center to pick up your package". As mentioned above, that would have been a 1h15min train journey (one-way) with multiple changes. Carrying a mattress.
I sincerely hope the customer rep actually understood why I told them that this was an immediate non-starter for me. Especially since I regularly missed packages because the mail carrier simply didn't attempt delivery at all.
My experience has been that DPD has by far the best delivery service. Not only can you reschedule delivery for a specific day, but you can do so in advance, or arrange a new address for the package to be delivered to. Perhaps this varies by location?
Of course it does! It's just that in my experience, rearranging delivery details still requires someone in the chain to give a shit.
The delivery person who wouldn't deliver the package on Monday is not going to give a shit if they're instructed to deliver on Tuesday 9am-11am instead, they're going to show up at 4pm and still act like they're doing me a favor.
What am I gonna do? I've already paid for the service, so the seller won't care. DPD won't care, they already got paid by the seller.
I live in a pretty safe suburb in the United States so I'm fine with packages left at my front door. In 20 years I have never had a package stolen.
For high value packages that require a signature I have them redirected to a UPS or FedEx store 1-2 miles from my house. This can be done by making a UPS or FedEx account which allows you to redirect packages. I can then pick them up after work and the line is never more than 1 or 2 people.
Amazon has recently introduced "Key by Amazon" which allows them to open your garage door and put the packages inside your garage.
> I can then pick them up after work and the line is never more than 1 or 2 people.
That's the part that really surprises me. In my experience picking up missed packages from the post office, they're completely empty 90% of the day, but after work, the line is out to the street!
And given that my transaction (present a pick-up slip - wait for employee to find package in the back - sign for package) is mostly trivial, I personally also find it a right waste of time for the postal employee.
When I order something and it is being shipped via FedEx I can login to my FedEx account and see the package tracking info. From there I can redirect the package to one of the multiple FedEx / Kinko's retail stores in my area. Then I walk in show my driver's license and can get my package. This is great if the package requires a signature and I won't be home during the day.
UPS has a similar web site and redirection options.
Oh, I see. That's a lot less useful since there are only two deliverers in my country that have pick-up locations anywhere within cities.
All the others (especially UPS) are way more oriented towards business customers nationwide, so there are basically no sellers using them for B2C shipping.
Yes, I'm lucky enough to be able to afford to live in a city.
Both in Switzerland (where I live) and in Germany (where I grew up), more rural postal offices have always struggled to be functional and not complete money sinks.
They have had to either reduce hours, reduce services, or close offices altogether in favor of subcontracting a local mom-and-pop shop to also handle package pick-up and drop-off.
There is a factory at the edge of town which employs one human and one dog. The human's job is to feed the dog. The dog's job is to keep the human away from the machines.
It's always strange to read these reports from American cities that sound like something out of war-torn countries. Delivery workers grouping together to defend themselves against hordes of bandits, in well-known places, with no police protection? What the ...?
This sort of thing would be unthinkable in central Moscow and most other large European city centres (the only European city I've ever felt unsafe in is Brussels, and that's still quite different from NYC).
Spoiler alert: the murder rate in Russia is 40% higher than in the US, and that's despite the very different gun laws [1][2].
Nothing ruins a good story like facts. That's also why you should always raise before you launch or enter a new market, etc. People are suckers for a story, and our brains are pre-wired to explain phenomena rather than to question them. Once you master that psychology (and manipulation) of people, you'll be better at fundraising - and apparently at journalism as well!
> Either way, it represents a significant decrease over the previous 15 years (in 2001, the homicide rate was 30.5). In 2018, according to Rosstat, there were 7,067 murders, and the homicide rate in Russia fell below the United States for the first time in recent history, falling to 4.9 per 100,000 compared to the US rate of 5.0 per 100,000 in 2018.
A common thing that happens in these comparisons is that people look at the Rosstat statistic that includes attempted murder.
Also, I'm specifically making my point about the major cities. Moscow sees a huge amount of investment of course, and I would expect the same from US cities like NYC or SF.
Could you expand on what this has to do with tazjin's point, which is specifically about delivery workers being attacked by robbers, and the police doing nothing about it, in specific cities?
He started off with "It's always strange to read these reports from American cities..."
It's strange because it's exaggerated, and it's exaggerated because it has to be - otherwise nobody would care to read the article (and then nobody would pay for this poor reporter's salary who has to hit certain monthly pageview targets, etc).
If you read something in the news and it sounds really strange, don't take it at face value.
My point was not to defend the crime rate in the US, but to address a question that a person from Russia asked - why does it sound like living in NYC is like watching some Western movie, whereas the same cannot be said about Moscow?
It sounded strange, because all it takes is a few YouTube searches to witness the level of violence that exists in Russia that far exceeds anything you'll see in the US. Russia really is something else in that regard, and if a Russian felt safer at home than in the US, it's simply a product of exaggerated reporting.
If someone living in Munich said that NYC is more dangerous than what they are used to, I wouldn't disagree with them.
You have never been to Russia and yet feel comfortable saying it is "something else in this regard", basing the statement on a YouTube search.
The average stats are about the same, but that's as useful a number as the average temperature of the patients in a hospital.
For the places a visitor is likely to go, Russia will definitely feel safer. Crime there is largely pushed out of the densely populated city cores and into the outskirts. In the US, it's the opposite. A downtown core looks (and smells) like a dystopia unimaginable to most citizens of the world. People are always shocked at how terrible the world cities that heard about so much look in person.
This comment of yours however does smack of that run of the mill American xenophobia, "all it takes is a few YouTube searches to witness the level of violence that exists in Russia that far exceeds anything you'll see in the US. Russia really is something else in that regard." All it takes is a few YouTube searches to find some really fucked up footage of cops violating Americans' rights every day.
Considering the US is notorious for mass shootings and gun violence, it's not at all surprising that someone would have that view. NYC is a fairly safe place, for now. So is Moscow.
The U.S., however, does not have the demographics of Western Europe.
Just like you can't compare Western Europe to Japan (it is much more violent in comparison, but again, different demographics).
The US is maybe 50% Europe, 30% Latin America, 8% Asia, 12% Africa, and if you look at the UN intentional homicide tables and take the weighted average by continent, you'll end up with an expected intentional homicide rate of about 5 per 100,000, which is right where the US is.
So stop pretending we are Western Europe - we aren't.
There's a HUGE difference between getting murdered by your friend in a drunken argument, and getting murdered by a stranger street criminal trying to rob you....
It's an issue in Dublin, Ireland too. Deliveroo riders are attacked and police seem to disregard it as an issue. Then when the riders started making maps describing which areas were dangerous the pearl-clutchers described it as "classist".
The victims themselves here are more or less part of the downtrodden caste. Some of them might not be living in the USA with legal authorization. They probably don't feel like the city is interested in protecting them, and it seems like in some cases they are already familiar with "protecting themselves" in organized groups. So with a lack of political interest in their case, banding together makes perfect sense.
Robbery of delivery workers has long been a problem in the city complicated by the fact that many of them don't trust/don't feel safe going to the police.
My first time on jury duty in nyc the case was armed robbery of a delivery worker to steal his cell phone - this was pre smart phone era, so let's say the phone's value was <$200.
Was a very depressing case tbh. One person at risk of death and another at risk of a long prison term for what was really petty theft (armed robbery makes the punishment much much worse than just petty theft would be).
Indeed. Maybe the part that's most depressing to me is that the long prison sentence clearly isn't enough of a disincentive against robbing another working-class person. How fucked up and bleak would your world have to be in order to do such a thing?
Harsher sentences can actually be detrimental. It's not so bleak that someone would be willing to spend years in prison for a $200 phone.
Similarly, I didn't actually believe it was worth more than $125 to be a few seconds earlier to work this morning, which would be a rational, economic justification for a $125 traffic ticket. Instead, I've driven some 250,000 miles in the past 10 years (thankfully done with the long highway commute that caused most of them), I'd say about half of them were at 5mph over, and I've never received a ticket. I traded a 1:100,000 chance of a ticket against keeping up with the rest of traffic who were also uniformly breaking the law; I'm pretty adept with numbers but I find it difficult to comprehend that scale.
They're trading a tiny, tiny chance of prison time against a $200 phone. The actual percentage of enforcement is irrelevant compared to the justified, reinforced belief that they won't be caught or punished. OP mentioned that as a juror they were depressed at the apparent mandate to sentence someone to years in prison for the petty theft, instead, consistent enforcement of an appropriate penalty would be far better at changing behaviors.
There's no way it's this simple. Looking at a map of NYC, it seems that this must be a fairly major bridge (southernmost connection from the Bronx to Manhattan) for all kinds of traffic. I'd expect plenty of average people not involved in delivery gangs (??) to cross there, too, and have issues with the roving bandits.
If this is a known crime hotspot, shouldn't police just be hanging out there?
My point is that there must be people who aren't involved in criminal gangs or deliveries crossing this bridge, too, so there should be a general interest in keeping it safe.
It seemed like these were targeted attacks- specific time window, specific target group. Most people crossing won't have something worth thousands of dollars on them, which can conveniently act as its own getaway vehicle, and which can then be fenced through what sounded like an established pipeline for this particular item
This is nothing new, the South Bronx has always been a notorious crime ridden mess.
I used to hang around some trucking forums and found that in the 70's-80's into the 90's Hunts Point was legendary among truckers as a war zone. From the stories and anecdotes the route between the ports and the expressway was a gauntlet of armed highwaymen. It was so bad truckers would not stop for red lights or stop signs for fear of being hijacked in broad daylight. It was customary to lean on the horn and try to roll through. A few even admitted to illegally carrying a pistol for protection.
I don't really think so. Americans often project this "no-go areas" type thinking onto europe. I'm not aware of any "no-go" areas anywhere in the country.
I think a ban on guns, and eg., an extreme historical scarcity of them in the UK means we aren't in the same position at all.
Yes there may be gangs. Yes there may be murders. But I think people delivering food on bikes arent in danger basically anywhere.
In Manchester in the UK there was one in 2019: an old railway line which has been converted into a bike path, the Fallowfield loop. Groups of teenagers were attacking cyclists with hammers and logs. I believe that the police woke up to it and it has calmed now but it was definitely a no-go area for me for a few months. I'm pretty sure someone tried to drop a fist-sized rock on me while I cycled under a bridge...
The amount of attention spent on Chesa Boudin and shoplifting is puzzling. Wage theft is by far the biggest form of stealing, and it’s rarely — if ever — prosecuted… but instead we’re worried about a small increase in petty larceny?
Police officers don't investigate wage theft, labor boards do. Not going after shoplifters, bike thieves and porch pirates doesn't free up any resources in order to go after wage theft, it just makes the area less safe and more expensive.
I don't understand why you're bringing this up when the TFA is about armed robbery. I do understand why someone would bring up SF in the first place, because SF decided to stop prosecuting "petty larceny". TFA is about what you'd also call "petty larceny", and the city seems to not care about it.
It feels like there’s a clear class difference. Almost all of these people are Hispanic/brown immigrants. If this was happening, and presuming it was worse than what the article described, what are the chances that you would know about it?
As a thought experiment, how long would it take for NYPD to respond if young, middle-class, college-aged joggers were being attacked with the same frequency at some dark Central Park corner.
Not war-torn, more like lawless wastelands. Cops don't really stop crime, the get their ticket quota and then if they have to follow up on other crime, they may show up and take a report.
Police in these major American cities, like all public sector workers (and especially emergency workers), get paid really well too.
The political system of these major Democrat dominated cities is entirely dysfunctional. The only thing the public sector unions, and their political puppets, offer as a solution, is more social spending:
2. It's not a case of violent ethnic minority preying on peaceful ethnic majority. There probably isn't a single "white" person involved in any of those crimes, as assailant or victim.
Another way to get crime stats to look good is to ignore crimes. Even from the article we are discussing here it sounds like there have been dozens of instances of assault and robbery that were ignored. Ignore enough and people stop wasting their time reporting crimes. Stats look great, the streets tell a different story.
Oops, didn’t notice the first link was for New York State. The CompStat link includes longer-term trends, though, which is what I was referring to.
Crime is down overall, and I suspect that if you controlled for the murder rate increase in all US cities over the past two years it might be flat or down in NYC as well.
Murder rate is arguably the most useful crime metric because it's the hardest one for politicians/police to game. Changes in enforcement can change trends for assaults and property crime, but you can't really hide bodies.
Well, you'd have to show that murder rates correlate with rates for other crime. But more important is digging into the thorny issue of what — and who — defines "crime". Because there are a ton of aspects to it: what laws are on the books, what laws are actually enforced, what various special interest groups want to legislate, what people analyzing data choose to include.
For example, as of 2017 feeding pigeons was a misdemeanor in Las Vegas [1]. That will show up in crime data, but you'd be hard-pressed to convince me that it correlates with the murder rate. And if you wanted me to compile a report on crime data, I'd probably ignore it altogether (which is essentially what people are doing when they refer to "violent crime" states).
For a slightly more charged example, let's say property owners push a law against sleeping in public. If they succeed and police don't enforce it, are they "gaming" the metrics? What if most other locals actually oppose the law?
Are you saying that we shouldn’t control for a coordinated national change in murder rate when evaluating the impact a mayor’s specific policies have had on their city?
Anti-police policies are not exclusive to the NYC though. If you want to control you need to show that murders also rise in the cities that don't have the same policies. Chicago, SF, Minneapolis don't appear a sensible choice for a control group in this regard.
NYC is subject to the same national economic, demographic, and cultural trends. For example, recently there has been a respiratory pandemic that affected the entire nation.
"Safety" in a city is an outcome of a very large number of interconnected factors. It is not under the control of any one mayor or police commissioner. More importantly, perception plays a large role in how people judge the safety a city or a neighborhood.
"Safe" is also very hard to define. Safe for who? Safe in what sense? It's a giant grey area and no one has ever been able to "solve" the crime problem. Getting tough on crime doesn't work, nor does endless social programs, nor does sweeping it under the rug.
Hopefully Adams will take a pragmatic approach and do what he can without making it worse. I wish him well.
There are plenty of non-exogenous causes, they just don't have the same cool-factor for publication as things like leaded gasoline. For example many people were released from institutions during the massive de-institutionalization push that started in the mid 50s [1], going from ~340 institutionalized people per 100,000 in 1955 to about 60 per 100,000 in 1980. One can even argue that the sum of incarcerated and institutionalized has averaged roughly constant (about 450 per 100,000) with a dip during the period of increasing criminality from the 1960s to the 1990s as the incarceration rate had to climb from ~100 to ~450 per 100,000 to make up for the mass de-institutionalization.
The cited study is pretty interesting:
"The juxtaposition of these trends and the current high incidence of severe mental illness among those behind bars begs the question of whether the mentally ill have simply been transinstitutionalized from mental hospitals to prisons and jails. A related question concerns the extent to which the unprecedented growth in incarceration since the late 1970s is driven by a reduction in public investment in inpatient mental health services. Past changes in sentencing and corrections policies are currently under heightened scrutiny as state prison populations are at record levels and many states are seeking to scale back correctional populations with an eye on the fiscal benefits of doing so. To the extent that the run-up in state prison populations was driven by deinstitutionalization, the current focus on sentence enhancements and the evolution of the U.S. sentencing regime may be misplaced."
If crack was a big driver for the previous crime wave, it heroin/fentanyl is likely to be a driver for this one. Or, on the West Coast, meth. It’s made a pretty big comeback since 2017, but it’s been mostly overshadowed by the opioid crisis.
We’ve recently started deploying expensive e-cargo bikes for our food delivery coop[1] to try to whittle down our carbon footprint and increase efficiency in urban areas. We have a similar problem of trying to protect our delivery assets (though not nearly as bad as the plight of the gig workers in the article given that our workers can count on the coop and also because Montreal is generally safer than NYC).
Our threat vectors are a bit different in that the bikes are more likely to be snatched when the rider is dismounted and in a building for a pickup or delivery. We’ve been experimenting by keeping a GPS in the frame and triggering something akin to a car alarm when the bike starts moving too significantly while the rider’s phone isn’t in the vicinity of the bike.
Our primary challenge has been finding the ideal way to lock the bikes while dismounted. The best chain locks are too unwieldy to use for the pace our couriers move at. Wheel locks were interesting but would end up breaking spokes when couriers would inevitably ride them while still locked. We’re currently giving folding locks a go. Open to suggestions if anyone has ideas or experience with other solutions.
>Our primary challenge has been finding the ideal way to lock the bikes while dismounted. The best chain locks are too unwieldy to use for the pace our couriers move at. Wheel locks were interesting but would end up breaking spokes when couriers would inevitably ride them while still locked. We’re currently giving folding locks a go. Open to suggestions if anyone has ideas or experience with other solutions.
Possibly something like the Velo Guard steering locks? They lock the steering in a fixed position (making the bike impossible to ride).
Crime in Montreal is actually quite a bit higher than in NYC. In 2019, with data from Statistics Canada (for Montreal) and the FBI (for NYC)...
Montreal's violent crime rate (1140 per 100k people) is double that of NYC (571 per 100k people). The property crime rate in Montreal (2,222 per 100k people) is similarly higher than NYC (1,460 per 100k people).
International comparisons for crimes with vague definitions are hard, and I don't think those numbers are effectively comparable.
Have a look [1].
'Murder' is a straight forward thing to define. Someone gets killed.
But 'assault' is a very vague thing.
According to that list 'Iceland' is a crime ridden country with overall crime 4x more than the US, even though murder in the US is more than 10x greater?
More like reporting, charges, definitions, data collection is different.
That said: Montreal is slightly sketchy for petty crime, and some places getting drunk and fighting is normal (UK/Nordic) and in some places, they use knives (i.e. Wales, Scotland).
I'm aware of no off the shelf solution, but this does sound like a problem that can be solved with electronics.
The motor controller could do electric braking if the rider's phone isn't in the vicinity of the bike. This would mean you can't push the pedals, but the wheels will still turn without resistance. If you forget to unlock it, you won't break the spokes, and there's no sudden halt, so you can still manually and safely break.
You could still run off with the bike on foot of course. But maybe if the pedals are blocked by the motor, you can use the standard lock without breaking the spokes?
We’ve increasingly been looking at electronics as you’ve suggested. I like the idea of tying the controller to the rider’s device. It would require some hacking with our current setup.
One of the big risks is that the cargo bikes are worth stealing with a truck or pickup. The resell value is great and even if the bike is inoperable, the parts can be easily dismantled and sold off. I worry that the tactics will shift more towards that direction as the bikes themselves get harder to ride off on.
When your threat model is two guys with a pickup truck and an angle grinder your only real mitigation is a claim against your insurance policy.
I think market is very close to a solution. I'm waiting for shipment on a Boomerang, which is an anti theft GPS that secures to the frame's water bottle attachment points. It's designed enough around connectivity that I could imagine motor lockdown in the next iteration.
Unfortunately one of the most competent motor builders, Bafang, just moved to a more closed CANBUS interface to penetrate markets that heavily regulate speed. Bosch has anti theft logic in their systems but there seems to be a smaller ecosystem for modding.
There are bike locks which do basically that. The only way to disarm them is to use the key, or pick them, and few thieves have the skill to do the latter.
Yeah, I’ve been following LPL’s videos and it seems like securing a bike with a lock from even a moderately determined attacker seems to be a hopeless task.
If the delivery industry can properly solve the problem of bike theft it would probably be the best thing it can possibly do for the climate and city life worldwide.
The work of Ela Bhatt in India in the 70s may be relevant. She organized women who did odd jobs like delivering this and mending that, despite having no one entity to negotiate against/with, and created the Self-Employed Women's Association, SEWA, which continues to operate today.
From a systemic perspective (which may run counter to your goals), I believe the best solution, which I know won't soon happen in a nation like the US that values comfort and convenience over health and nature, but it's to return to home cooking over deliveries. While it would decrease these jobs, it wouldn't hurt the economy. People who saved delivery money would still spend it, just not on these dangerous jobs.
It makes sense from a systemic perspective. We say we need immigrants to do the jobs Americans don't want to do, but I believe that view reverses cause and effect. Rather than having job vacancies first and need people second, when people divorced from the actual work see lots of cheap labor, they find ways to use it that no one would choose for themselves.
We once had butchers, grocers, and tailors. Then big box stores drove them out of business and replaced them with slaughterhouses and such, incredibly dangerous jobs increasing the disparity of wealth. I see reversing that trend as helping restore safety and dignity to the work and a middle class to the nation.
My result: I don't think I've ever had something home delivered besides the post office, UPS, and Fedex, which don't have these time limits. Shopping for myself and cooking save time and money, plus I meet and form relationships with my counterparts at the coop, farmers market, and CSAs. I pollute a lot less too, taking two years to fill a load of garbage since I avoid packaging.
Unfortunately, this is the honest answer. The best bikelocks in the world can be cut with a $100 cordless angle grinder and $20 carbide blade. I watched the CCTV footage of the thief walk up with a Dewalt multitool and hack through my $50 U-lock in 30 seconds.
The same technology that can propel a Tesla to 100km/h in under 5 secs is also the same technology in new cordless powertools. And the theives steal those too!
Your only real defense is for them to have something better to steal. Make your bike uglier!
For ebikes, removing the battery might be an option. Without it it's a (in my case) 60 lb beast that isn't good for much of anything. And it's very obvious that it's missing, so you wouldn't accidentally try to take it and then have to search for what's missing. It pops out in 5 seconds with a car-style key.
> The company has been sued multiple times for worker misclassification, tip theft, and other infractions. It settled three times, avoiding a ruling that could torpedo its business model, and another case is currently in arbitration.
We gotta find some way to stop companies from repeatedly settling the same claims to avoid a ruling against them. The system is set up so they can pay to sweep individual cases under the rug while maintaining the systemic problem.
In an adversarial system like the US has, if the claimant decides to drop the case, there is no case. You need something like a state's AG to get involved.
It is pretty horrific that we live in a society where such stories are considered okay. You can replace the bikes by something else and could easily believe that what is described is Dickens's story about 19th century London.
So let me get this straight - it's a bad deal for the restaurants, it's an increasingly bad deal for the deliverymen and it depends on VCs subsidizing it to even work?
How did something like this even get funded? I mean, I could understand if the development costs were being funded by VC money, but actual deliveries? Even if one company were to actually dominate the market, it would still need to continue subsidizing variable costs and there is no moat to protect them from competition.
Operating a two-sided marketplace is one hell of a moat. Nobody's displacing eBay, Amazon, or the Google Play Store anytime soon; even Craigslist seems to be getting by. Here in Argentina, MercadoLibre established an eBay clone before eBay moved in; the consequence was that eBay just bought shares instead of even trying to compete. The VCs are betting that a similar thing will happen with delivery apps: one of them will win, and then they'll be in a position to dictate Apple-like 30% terms to diners and restaurants.
(And, as eru points out, they might be able to establish a regulatory moat to prevent any new entrants from arising once they're established, like the drug and medical device companies. Did you know the first clinical implantation of a cardiac pacemaker was in 01958, only two years after the transistor was invented? The patient died—in 02001, 43 years later. How long do you think it takes an incrementally improved new pacemaker design to get regulatory approval today? Much less a totally new kind of medical device?)
Keep in mind, though, that "VCs are betting" doesn't mean that the VCs think this is the most likely outcome, even the ones who did invest. It just means they think it's sufficiently plausible that if it does happen they want to own a piece of it.
> Operating a two-sided marketplace is one hell of a moat. Nobody's displacing eBay, Amazon, or the Google Play Store anytime soon; even Craigslist seems to be getting by. Here in Argentina, MercadoLibre established an eBay clone before eBay moved in; the consequence was that eBay just bought shares instead of even trying to compete.
That's due to network effects, not because they're operating a two-sided marketplace. And then you list an example where that moat failed (Argentina - and it's not just Argentina).
I suspect that on this particular market, network effects won't have as strong of an effect and the local players have better market insight since they're far closer to the customer.
Yes, that's because of network effects, but that doesn't mean it's not because they're operating a two-sided marketplace. Operating a two-sided marketplace often provides extremely strong network effects; for example, listing a one-of-a-kind product for auction on eBay means you can't list it for auction on MercadoLibre. (Though now most MercadoLibre listings are mass merchants, not people cleaning out their storage space.) And I don't think MercadoLibre's survival is an example of where that moat failed; it was just outside eBay's moat.
Two-sided markets are kind of like Willie Sutton's banks. The buyers have to go to, say, Amazon, because that's where the products are. The sellers have to go to Amazon because that's where the buyers are. Amazon does whatever they think they can get away with to keep those relationships exclusive, which is the genius of Fulfilled by Amazon.
I suspect that you're right about the food delivery market. Probably most of the VCs investing in it also suspect you're right. They just aren't sure.
BTW I had to upvote your comment because some dumb fuck downvoted it.
Some people must believe this model can be made to work.
I think it might happen via ghost kitchens. Distributed food preparation and couriers picking from small restaurants is inefficient. Larger kitchens, optimized for quick pickups, same people preparing food under many different brands.
Maybe one can also rethink how the apps work, to bring bit more efficiency (if you control the larger part of the production chain). Most of the time when using these apps I'm hungry and I just want to eat. I would be actually quite happy, if the app could provide some decent recommendations on what could be delivered quickly.
IMO this branch of the thread signifies the core of the issue.
I'd argue that if we went down the rabbit hole of delivery startups to find where the thought originated that these kinds of businesses "must work somehow", we'd find irrationality.
Recently, I've come to realize that maybe all that's bad in the world is simply that at one point in the value supply chain someone favored an irrational over a rational thought. In case that person was very influental, we get cases like this where food is delivered through a permanently unprofitable strategy.
I wish we could just further rationalize the whole business to find the actual product's value and its market fit. Intuitively, it probably lays within canibalizing the actual business heavily and by e.g. not really delivering food on demand anymore. People just want the convenice of getting food quickl yand a wide variety + a threshold of quality.
Delivery drivers are one option to a huge solution space.
But those companies and investors can't afford to backtrack anymore. They now have to die to make space for a more adjusted solution. It's absurd.
> [...] and there is no moat to protect them from competition.
The moat might come: there's always pressure for more regulation. Once a company is established, it can yield to that pressure and even actively invite more regulation.
Thanks to regulatory capture, regulation often acts as a moat for incumbents.
Because those awesome projects have low possible returns, or are not "web scale". VC's invest in projects that have high potential returns and growth possibilities.
The hope for most of the investors is to undercut the competition out of business, build customer loyalty and then hike prices as far as I can tell.
Which seems to miss that even if they succeed at doing that to the incumbents, they're then vulnerable to the next investor's subsidised business doing the same to them.
>they're then vulnerable to the next investor's subsidised business doing the same to them
It happens rarely nowadays unless they change something notably about their offering or the next investor is a major corporation that couldn't buy out the smaller player.
I also got interested, there's a link to the github page near the bottom of the site: server is source available, commercial use is only allowed to co-ops and a few other entities, the client is opensource (MIT license).
> I'm curious - why is there no open source solution to replace these apps? If not with full functionality, then at least with 80% of the features?
Who would benefit from that? Delivery companies offer a simple and practical way to process orders and payments. Restaurant chains can and do provide their own in-house delivery services. The added-value is not the software infrastructure but the service that's provided.
What exactly is the value proposition of open-sourcing a platform?
If the market operated more efficiently, everyone would benefit. The question is, would it be more efficient?
I can imagine some kind of federated system where restaurants put out a contract in response to a customer order, workers bid on it. Maybe there's even blockchain based reviews.
It seems that efficiently connecting buyers and sellers in the delivery labor market, without an middle party to collect huge fees, would be beneficial to everyone.
You're asking two different questions: an open source app is not an organization, and the organization does more than zero here (as another commenter said, you need cooperation)
Secondly you suggest a co-op, which could maybe work if this were actually a profitable sector. Currently it's still loss-leading
I have actually thought about this a lot. I think the answer to your actual question (why not?) is obvious: people with the capital+skills to start this up do not have a solid profit motive. People who would benefit from it don't have capital+skills.
However I think setting up something like a worker-owned cooperative to replace various gig economy companies would be a really cool project. Honestly if such a service existed, and my friends continued to use the (cheaper) VC-subsidised option, I'd ostracize them for it.
These applications will 100% be decentralized, but cryptocurrency needs better scalability first. You can't be paying $20 in gas fees to place an order.
Use of the convoy system to protect people crossing the bridge, like WW2 defence against U-Boats? Ingenious, but it's sad that it's become dangerous enough to justify that.
Seems like Gotham is eager to live up to its comic book version. Except in real life you don't get Batman stepping in, you get the mafia. It's easy to see the next step too: these organized protection groups get some members who specialize in being the muscle, and an ambitious leader who'll actually market himself as the protector of the people instead of just a guy with a Facebook page.
The most disappointing thing about this article is the absolute apathy from the NYPD. At this point the police writ large are practically sabotaging their reputation with absolutely no self awareness whatsoever. What are we going to do as a society as it becomes increasingly obvious to every citizen that the police, in fact are not here to protect, NOR to serve?
It's been known since 2005 [1] (with precedent back to the 1980's) that the police have no Constitutional duty to protect citizens from harm, even from a specific, credible, and immediate threat. They could basically do nothing, and as long as their management chain is happy, no problem.
Yes, those of us who follow these things know about that decision, but as more and more people find out, there is less and less trust and respect for police, and that's not good for society nor the police.
The odd thing is that many PDs around the country are doubling down rather than re-examining their mission and culture.
At least in Germany (and France afaik) riders have been fighting towards unionization, better treatment, and even ownership (see: https://kolyma2.coopcycle.org/de/)
Gorillas especially has been hit hard with literal revolt by riders, which let to some pretty amusing press conferences by their CEO.
Sad to see they succeeded in obtaining a legal right to restrict other people's right to freely contract, and an indoctrinated public passively accepts it.
Going on strike was the freely chosen decision of the delivery workers. Their employer freely chose to meet their demands rather than going out of business. Sure, the bosses might have preferred to pay independent contractors pennies to work 90 hours a week and destroy their own health, but in just societies that isn't an option.
The laws surrounding striking violate the employer's contract liberty. For example, the employer cannot simply fire the contractors/workers striking, and replace them with people willing to accept their offer.
>>but in just societies that isn't an option.
Someone offering people work on terms that you think are inadequate is not unjust. Interfering in private interactions between other consenting adults, to deny them the option to engage in some voluntary interaction, is what's an unjust act, that is predicated on an unearned sense of moral superiority.
And such an interjection doesn't improve the opportunities available to workers in general. If it were that easy, we could set a minimum wage of $500/hr, under which all employment offers are illegal, and create instant prosperity.
The correct wage level, for maximizing economic development, and by extension, wage growth, is set by market forces, via the intersection of supply of labor, and the output that people are willing to trade for that labor.
The Foodora workers who unionised and won a better contract in Norway were never self-employed, they were always on part-time contracts. What they achieved was for their equipment (bikes, smartphone and clothing) to be compensated by their employer and a higher hourly wage. Would love to see some of your reasoning for how exactly this outcome restricted other workers rights?
>>Would love to see some of your reasoning for how exactly this outcome restricted other workers rights?
It prevents other workers from underbidding them, by making it illegal for the employer to hire those workers due to the contract liberty suppressing mandate to engage exclusively in collective bargaining with the union.
Forcing companies to pay more than market wages is also bad for society at large by discouraging investment into such companies. More investment into companies leads to lower consumer prices which translates to an effective wage hike for all workers.
> It prevents other workers from underbidding them
Reread my comment, they were never able to underbid each other in the first place they already had a fixed hourly rate, the strike and subsequent contract negotiated a higher rate so nothing to do with their ability to underbid was changed since it was never possible. So I'll ask again, how are did this specific incident restrict the rights of other workers?
The company did not agree to anything freely. When the contractors striked, the company was prevented, by contract right violating laws, from replacing the strikers with new workers. They were therefore being extorted, and agreed under duress. The agreement prevented other workers, who are willing to work for the previous hourly wage, from underbidding the unuionized workers.
Poor Foodora being extorted, forced to pay a living wage and provide better working conditions. I’m sure the other workers you’re referring to are really upset that they’ll now receive compensation for equipment and a higher hourly wage.
It's completely irrelevant to human rights which groups stands to benefit from an authoritarian intervention. Rights are not predicated on whether you're big people, or little people.
And as it would happen, giving a select group of 'little people' special privileges, through coercive force against employers, results in higher consumers, which hurts all other little people and/or less investment, which reduces future wage growth, for all workers.
Usually what is the case is that they use these people as workers (Making it so that they can't set their own rates or contract freely like someone who isn't an employee could)
but then call them something else to avoid workers protections and liabilities.
Extra-contractual worker protections and liabilities are simply prohibitions on voluntary interactions between consenting adults (those contracts that exclude said protections/liabilities). Mandating minimum employment benefits is not economically sound, or consistent with a free society.
With respect to the first point, forcing companies to overpay for labor (whether directly, through above market wages, or indirectly, through reduced management flexibility, or more costly benefits) results in higher unemployment, as previously profitable hiring opportunities become unprofitable, and a less optimal allocation of company funds, that leads to less economic development, which is the source of all wage growth.
Also mandatory benefits are a cookie-cutter solution that reduce the flexibility that employers and workers have to reach terms that maximize the benefit the worker enjoys with a given expenditure of resources by the employer. For example, the mandate may require 4 weeks of paid leave a year, while a particular worker may prefer less paid leave, and instead higher hourly wages, but the mandate prevents this. Given companies have a limited amount of funds available to spend on labor expenses, there is an opportunity cost attached to every mandatory benefit.
"For years, bike activists and workers pushed for legalization, though the apps that benefited from them were largely silent. It was only when another group of tech companies — hoping to make scooter-sharing legal — joined the fight that a bill moved forward in Albany."
These workers by and large aren't carrying money worth stealing they are being robbed of expensive e-bikes. If these bikes were configured to become inoperable if they couldn't either phone home or talk to the users device then there would be no point in stealing them because nobody would buy them.
The end user could authorize their own new devices unless they lost access to both devices and info needed to do so and the manufacturer could handle same if and only if you were the original registered owner or ownership had been transferred in a verifiable way.
See why phone theft isn't as big a deal anymore they aren't worth anything if they can't easily be used anywhere.
The other ridiculous conditions are solved by making them threat their employees as employees and pay them a minimum wage for time spent including spent idling + millage.
If this plus vc money eventually exiting makes some portion of the work uneconomical so be it.
"He reported both to the police, but the cases went nowhere, an experience common enough that many workers have concluded calling 911 is a waste of time."
Is so frustrating. The theft of thousands of dollars worth of equipment with the threat of violence in a known location and the police aren't interested?
> Police are incredibly bad at handling low-level property crime.
These are somehow strange and inexplicable societal values concerning crime.
A cycle blog here in Sweden recently had an article on several really simple measures that could be taken to help curtail bike theft (which is epidemic) but neither the police, insurance companies or reselling sites were interested in their suggestions. Bikes can be worth the equivalent of thousands of dollars.
Last week I was walking into a grocery store when 4 police were arresting a guy who looked very dejected, and I asked an assistant what had happened she said he was caught stealing a piece of meat.
Police do not necessarily reflect the values of wider society, they may have their own values. Ranging from anti-cyclist prejudice to simple workplace laziness - I suspect the grocery guy was caught by staff and all they had to do was take him away.
"...food-delivery workers returning home after their shifts have been violently attacked there for their bikes: by gunmen pulling up on motorcycles, by knife-wielding thieves leaping from the recesses..."
Those are crimes that carry multi-year prison sentences.
Police are incredibly bad at handling auto-theft level of property crime.
It seems like the root issue isn’t the catching but the recatching. If you want to nearly eliminate it, punish it like Singapore does. I don’t think we have the will to do that (in fact, seem to be heading in the opposite direction), so police will continue to catch the heat for how much property crime continues to happen.
Not him but i'm pretty sure that's not what he or anyone making that reference means in this scenario.
Owning a bike or a car doesn't net one the relevant power of what one refers to when one says capital in this scenario. For example the NYPD mentioned gets millions in donations and i can assure you those don't come from gig workers who feel like they need more protection from them.
The crime described in the article hurts capital too. Many companies have to leave markets due to the costs imposed by the described criminality. This bifurcation betweem labor and capital is an invention of socialists/unions, to draw attention away from the exploitation that they demand.
Have you ever attended a local government hearing in a large city? It's filled with people on the dole, affiliated with a network of taxpayer subsidized nonprofits and social agencies, all promoting far-left ideological platitudes that the local politicians parrot for their own survival. There is no chance these companies could outlobby the forces against them. Basic policing in general is virulently opposed within these circles, I hypothesize because it precludes the alternative 'solution': more social spending, ostensibly aimed at solving the "root causes" of crime, but really designed to fill the pockets of Poverty Inc.
I think as a lobbying force to counter these destructive special interests, the best chance we have is property owners. If they organize at a larger scale, they could potentially fund their own army of local lobbyists capable of matching those of the beneficiaries of the tax payer funded social programs. Home Owners Associations already have some organization, and if they pool their funds together, could be a political force to reckon with.
Notice that there was also a part in the article where the police simply didn't understand the bikes were that expensive, and educating an officer on that changed their attitude.
Frustrating, still, but improvement seems at least possible.
There are a number of reasons this wouldn't work, especially once the thieves have figured this out. They'll then be incentivised to stop the bike for both the phone and the bike, and before you as the driver were able to remote block both items would have been bricked by the thieves. It's easy to take apart an electric bike, especially the ones that have been customised.
Agreed with the treating of employees properly though, these guys go through the ringer just from regular customers and order systems I can't imagine adding thieves to the mix.
There's still value in it if it's inoperable; the motor and battery are still worth enough to make it worthwhile, and I guess the frame can be repurposed too.
I mean look at cars; just taking the wheels or radio out is already worth the effort. The radio is less viable these days though, since they're built in so more difficult to remove, and there's a lockout if it's disconnected from power (for which you need a code).
I don't believe you can truly make the bike inoperable. Yes, you can make its electronics inoperable but I don't believe you can feasibly make its battery, engine or the mechanics inoperable.
I mean theoretically you could, but not in a safe way.
Bike thieves aren't bike mechanics and modern hardware has chips that could fail to perform their task or even brick themselves. It could fail to charge or stop charging at 10% it could spin up the motor but inadequately. It could appear to start but gradually turn off for no reason 10 minutes later leaving it in all instances a safe expensive human powered bike.
It could broadcast I'm a stolen bike with cords with the electrical pathway to the transmitter being also wired to something else more vital.
You could pass an encoded unique to device signal over the rest of the system with chips elsewhere expecting that signal and noping out if they don't get it to foil rewiring.
You could require a periodic modifier received over the air encoded in chip2 .. chip n but not available in chip 1 like a series of codes for your key fob to unlock your car.
You could absolutely make it as hard to defeat as defusing a bomb and lunatics who wave glass bottles are no longer stealing your bikes.
I'd rather build a much simpler bike with the parts - the chip won't do a thing. Heck even the battery pack and the brushless motor + the frame are fine on their right own.
Which suggests locking it at the battery level might more most profitable. Looks like they cost as much as $900. Crackhead thieves that wave around broken bottles aren't going to be highly inspired to buy a new $900 part to render their $2000 bike that they intend to sell for $1500 serviceable.
It takes a one step $1500 profit to a 2 step $600 profit. Might as well rip off the best buy for crack money instead.
Those batteries are vastly overpriced. The individual cells cost next to nothing and the BMS in them is an off-the-shelf component. But almost all of them contain some kind of DRM which makes it so that they only talk to their own manufacturers motor. This makes repairing them a fairly difficult thing, especially because they are typically constructed in such a way that opening them up is hard or will break stuff.
Triggering inoperability in a safe way is not an issue.
The problem is that you would need to reach mass adoption of the technology, so that the fact of that specific item not being worth stealing would become common knowledge.
> The other ridiculous conditions are solved by making them threat their employees as employees and pay them a minimum wage for time spent including spent idling + millage.
Basically, there's not much binding riders to a specific delivery app. Many cities have multiple competing apps that riders relatively easily switch between.
