...I want to talk about a new junction I have been observing around the city to manage distribution. One of the key takeaways from my day with the driver in wholesale delivery was how arbitrarily irregular the built and lived environment is. This characteristic of life’s effect on logistics has given rise to the model of delivery I have observed over the last year in Manhattan, a micro hub and spoke system for neighborhood service.
First, the problem. The world in which we live is complex and complicated to navigate, from roads, to entries, to inhabited spaces. In deliveries, during my day in the truck, this influenced route planning and the truck’s arrival approach to take into account how road design and access paths shaped choices. But most intricately, the challenges were manifest where the hand truck met the world. The last junction to retails nodes is an obstacle course. The are curbs, doors, arrow aisles, bumps, obstacles, and chaotic storage. It demands a human’s labour. Innovation to make the job better is to be found in the truck to hand truck junction and in better hand trucks.
The human solution to the environment figures in the innovative approach to residential deliveries in Manhattan. Addressing the complications of traffic and parking stresses in the process of moving a truck from point to point without investing in local warehousing or robotics, high density services have implemented what I would describe as the devolution of a distributed one-container warehouses to manage local hub and spoke deliveries in neighborhoods. In operation, the system itself is simple. Trucks park up at central points in residential-dense neighborhoods and then discharge individuals on foot and hand truck to their destinations. And here I would argue it needs a human not a robot for a variety of reasons. The sidewalks are a disaster of obstacles and disorder. Buildings have doors and stairs to enter, with access at the control of buzzers or doormen. There are myriad drop methods, either to a person, a foyer, or a secured box. And when the issues of scale and flexibility of the operation are factored in, these obstacles are best navigated and managed by this system of human operators.
Jill Sargent Russell, PhD
