Town of Concord Age-friendly Businesses Project

The first obstacle encountered by the program involved identifying the right staging location for pilot operations. Based on other e-cargo bike pilots, such as the one launched in Seattle in 2018, the city initially believed operations could be staged out of a municipal parking lot. Equipment and packages were to be stored in shipping containers, and tents would offer shelter to personnel loading and unloading bikes.

However, after contracting with the service operator, it became clear operations could not be hosted in a municipal parking lot with temporary structures as was originally planned. Instead, they needed to find a secure indoor location that would accommodate safe battery charging, more secure equipment storage, and an office for delivery workers to utilize in between shifts. After several months, The City connected the service operator with a vacant storefront owned by Boston University. The bulk of the grant funding went towards covering rent and renovation costs of this space  for the operator.

When moving into a new market, e-cargo bike delivery operators need, at minimum, a secure indoor space to store equipment, charge batteries, sort packages, and provide a rest area for employees. This can and should be supplemented with additional curbside loading spaces or outdoor micro logistics hubs depending on scale. Identifying where and how the e-cargo bike delivery operators will stage their key operations should be a prerequisite for developing or launching further program components. 

Businesses with high delivery volumes within a dense area represent the ideal use case for an e-cargo bike delivery service. Additionally, working with businesses that have not only high, but also predictable volumes can aid in route optimization that further increases the value-add of e-cargo bikes. Without this volume and density, an e-cargo bike delivery service becomes less cost effective relative to a traditional delivery vehicle.  

Because of this, small businesses and main street districts are not necessarily able to provide the operational foundation needed to make this service efficient and sustainable. Boston Delivers demonstrated that while small businesses can absolutely benefit from a subsidized e-cargo bike delivery service, these partnerships should be supplementary, not foundational, to this delivery service-based program model.  

On demand food deliveries generate significant congestion and traffic safety issues across the City. Food delivery platforms like Uber Eats, GrubHub, and Doordash drive this activity while representing both a lifeline and burden to local restaurants. There is great interest in offering an alternative delivery solution that alleviates congestion and decreases costs to both businesses and the end consumer.

Boston Delivers tested a partly subsidized dedicated e-bike delivery service. The service was priced hourly and ran during the peak hours of Thursday-Saturday from 5-9pm. The service utilized the “self delivery” option offered to restaurants by the most popular delivery apps. This allowed restaurants to hand off the delivery to a Boston Delivers courier as opposed to sending it into typical delivery driver network.

This model, in theory, addressed two main challenges:

1. The ability to fulfill orders that are placed on the apps without relying on the apps driver network and
2. Significantly decreasing the commission fee restaurants pay to delivery apps on every order. Additionally, pricing the delivery service hourly as opposed to per delivery allows high volume restaurants to save more money the more deliveries they fulfill.

Even so, the City encountered significant challenges when implementing this model. Different restaurants had unique limitations when it came to adopting self-delivery. If restaurants weren’t able to easily switch to self-delivery within a certain time frame and radius then they weren’t able to utilize the service. Because of this barrier, The City wasn’t able to fully implement and expand this food delivery model.  

Many municipalities express uncertainty regarding safely handling lithium-ion batteries. All levels of government have an opportunity to develop more robust guidelines for how private industry and individual users can safely handle lithium-ion battery powered mobility devices.

Operators like Net Zero have adopted safety practices and procedures that greatly reduce the risk of a fire or other safety hazard. These practices and procedures are formulating ongoing work on the city level to adopt lithium-ion battery policies and guidelines. 

Adopting up to date e-bike and e-cargo bike definitions on the state and/or local level is key to encouraging mode shift. Additionally, giving these e-cargo bikes not just access, but priority at the curb via dedicated loading zones is an important incentive.

Finally, cities seeking to introduce a large-scale deployment of e-cargo bikes on their streets must have protected bike infrastructure that can accommodate e-cargo bikes and permit e-cargo bikes best suited for the infrastructure. Hence, the importance of regulating form factors alongside bike infrastructure planning.

Without clear policy frameworks and robust infrastructure, private industry will not entertain mode shift. Boston Delivers has created an opportunity to explore and demonstrate the impacts of these key policy and infrastructure considerations.