You may have encountered this situation lately in Manhattan while making your way down a sidewalk already crowded with trash bags, pedestrians, sidewalk sheds, and the odd parked police car. A big truck or two is parked at the curb, often starting in the morning. The trucks might be Amazon-branded or carry other names, some familiar, such as FedEx. The back doors roll up, and a crew of delivery workers begins sorting and stacking hundreds of boxes and pouches onto rolling dollies and hand trucks. Sometimes they’ll set up folding tables at the curb, but often the goods are piled in the parking lane. The crews unload and fan out, rain or shine, until all the boxes are gone. Effectively, they build a temporary micro–distribution warehouse hung off the back of a truck, one that disappears at the end of each day. It’s a shipping hub at the curb, and I have taken to calling it a hurb.
Is it legal? After a fashion. The hurb has been enabled, at least in part, by the stipulated-fine program, a maddening, if practical, New York City policy in which delivery companies agree in advance to slightly discounted parking fines in exchange for promising not to contest them. A parking ticket becomes, simply, a day rate factored into the budget as a cost of doing business. Moreover, Amazon usually isn’t the one paying. Hurb operators are, for the most part, contractors working for Amazon, what the company calls “fulfillment partners.” A handful of them have divvied up Manhattan into zones, each maybe 40 blocks up and down, east or west of Fifth Avenue; one serving Midtown East, for example, is called InZone Logistics. According to a federal filing, it has 40 drivers.
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