The last mile problem was originally about telephone wires–every home had its own wire strung the last mile from the exchange, and it cost a lot of money to string and maintain. In public transportation, it addresses the question of how people get home from the bus stop and how far they are willing to go. In logistics, it is the expense of getting a single package to the final destination. According to Investopedia: “The operations of the last mile can be a huge percentage of the total delivery costs. As a share of the total cost of shipping, last mile delivery costs are substantial, often reaching or even exceeding 50%.”
We recently wrote e-cargo bikes would eat F-150s, but perhaps should have written they would eat delivery vans. As Treehugger’s Sami Grover noted earlier, e-cargo bikes were 1.61 times faster than an equivalent journey by van and were able to deliver more packages at the same time. It also saves a huge cloud of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. In the study Grover quoted, they determined “replacing just 10% of van freight with bikes would save as much as 133,300 metric tons of carbon dioxide and 190.4 thousand kilograms of nitrogen oxide per year.”
In a city with modern bike infrastructure, traditional delivery vans are a disaster—that’s why we have FedEx lanes, not bike lanes. This is why the micromobility hub is so important: It enables the delivery in a manner suitable for the infrastructure, whether it is the sidewalk or the bike lane. And this is why the e-bike revolution plays such a big part in this story; they dramatically extend the range that the micromobility hub can serve, solving the 3-mile problem.
But this is also why transportation consultant Jarrett Walker’s tweet is so important; none of this works if you do not have the kind of land use, the density that puts enough customers in those ranges that can be served by feet and e-bikes. Get the density right, and all good things follow.
