Ban the robots, but free the cargo e-bikes to cut traffic congestion on Toronto streets

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This article was published 14/12/2021 (1434 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Our house is a sea of cardboard. With a baby due in a couple of weeks, the delivery boxes have been piling up.

We’ve got a box with a stroller. A box with a bassinet. Boxes with bottles and bibs and baby clothes and baby books. Boxes with various gadgets and gizmos and gifts.

And while our impending arrival has increased our box delivery frequency even more compared to non-baby times, we’re hardly unique in receiving more deliveries now versus a few years ago. The pandemic was a bonanza for direct-to-your-door business, with e-commerce sales rising 99 per cent in the early weeks of lockdown in 2020. Internet orders as a share of all retail sales have since come back to earth a bit this year as lockdowns eased, but the percentage is expected to stay well above pre-pandemic levels permanently.

Because it translates to more activity on our streets, all this delivery demand has policy implications at city hall. When Mayor John Tory and Toronto council meet Wednesday to kick off their final meeting of the year, they’ll have two major debates about the future of shipping and delivery.

The first you might have read about because it involves robots. Specifically, robotic devices that roam the sidewalks of the city and deliver items to your door.

The report to council from Toronto’s Accessibility Advisory Committee recommends adopting a ban on businesses deploying these so-called “automated micro-utility devices” on city sidewalks and bike paths.

A ban is the right call — for now. Despite some protests from industry groups arguing a ban would stymie innovation, Toronto’s sidewalk space and bike infrastructure is limited and simply handing it over, without regulation, to businesses trying to make a buck with untold legions of delivery droids is several steps too far. This is new tech, with a lot of unanswered questions about accessibility and reliability. Public spaces are not the right venue for tech companies to conduct their beta testing.

Besides, there’s a whole lot more potential in the other delivery-related item on council’s agenda this week. This report, if adopted, would opt the city into a provincial pilot project allowing the use of electric cargo-bikes. The city had partially opted into the pilot this summer but set a weight limit of 120 kilograms for the cargo e-bikes. Now they’re proposing to ditch that limitation, allowing truly heavy-duty e-bikes to make deliveries in this city.

While the track record of delivery robots is still pretty sketchy — see reports last week about a fleet of robots in Estonia getting stuck in some snow — the cargo e-bikes are a proven game changer. A study by the University of Westminster that made use of GPS data to analyze deliveries in London, England found that cargo bikes were 1.6 times faster at making deliveries than delivery vans, travelling at an average speed of 10 km/h versus 6 km/h for vans.

In central London, the bikes can deliver an average of seven packages an hour, versus just four for bigger vehicles, according to the report — punching way above their weight. A New York City department of transportation study found that even with their smaller carrying capacity, the efficiency of cargo bikes means they are capable of replacing trucks on a 2:1 or even 1:1 basis in particularly in traffic-congested areas.

And the environmental benefit is huge. The New York study found each bike resulted in a reduction of approximately 7 tons of CO2 emissions per year

With transportation accounting for 36 per cent of Toronto’s greenhouse gas emissions, shifting more deliveries to cargo bike would make a huge difference. And unlike with the robots, there’s no waiting for technology to mature — this shift is ready to start now.

The robots may be ready someday too. I don’t think council would be wise to close off any consideration of automated delivery devices in the future. Any mobility technology that provides an alternative to cars is worth keeping a very close eye on.

Over the long term, simply banning alternatives instead of thinking about how to redesign our streets — generally by reducing space given over to cars — to make way for things like e-scooters, delivery droids and other new types of so-called “micromobility” would be a move in the wrong direction.

But for now, I’ll shed no tears for the delivery robots should council opt to ban them this week. Instead, I’ll be looking forward to the day I’m able to get boxes for this baby via bike.

Matt Elliott is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @GraphicMatt