The new microhubs for delivery companies are fairly no-frills; a paint job and a few plastic barriers demarcate the zone.
Photo: NYC Department of Transportation
On a recent afternoon on Amsterdam Avenue, cars piled up behind an Amazon truck double-parked next to a Mercedes. Honking ensued. Drivers cut each other off, trying to inch ahead. On the next block, it was the same scene, this time caused by a truck dropping off supplies at an upscale Mediterranean restaurant. More honking. More angry drivers. More cars piling up.
Where the Avenue meets West 85th Street, though, it was quiet. Robert Harden was sitting in the back of his truck, parked in its own spot. He was waiting for a courier on a cargo bike, who arrived soon after. The driver, Jestina Brasier, pulled up into a designated space behind the truck and dismounted from what looked like a trike version of an Italian Piaggio. She had just returned from dropping off a cart’s worth of HelloFresh meal boxes — today’s package du jour — to local addresses and would reload her bike again from Harden’s truck.
The two seemed relaxed — at least far more than the delivery drivers double-parked up the street. But Harden and Brasier hadn’t just lucked into a couple of parking spots that day; they were at a “microhub” designated for their company, Net Zero Logistics. The e-commerce company is one of three businesses to receive the city’s earliest permits for them. (The other two are Amazon and UPS.) The setup — in this case, a loading zone next to cafégoers at Fellini Coffee — is fairly no-frills: a space the size of several parking spots, demarcated with standard truffle-brown paint and white traffic lines and guarded by plastic bollards and a parking sign that reads, “No Standing.” There are fewer cars piling up, less honking, fewer angry drivers. “It’s a beautiful thing,” says Harden.
The three microhubs, all located on the Upper West Side, are part of the “Smart Curbs” program, the latest attempt by the city to tame the congestion of online delivery, which deposits more than 2 million packages in the city every day (a number that’s set to double over the next 20 years). Even after establishing “neighborhood loading zones” (available to any truck), installing package lockers, incentivizing overnight deliveries, legalizing wider cargo e-bikes, and, at a macro scale, reducing traffic with congestion pricing, conditions are still untenable.
A driver gets their cargo bike ready for deliveries at a microhub on the Upper West Side.
Photo: NYC Department of Transportation
Whether microhubs succeed hinges on a few factors. At the top is how much the city is willing to trade off with drivers hungry for parking. After all, the sites are competing for some of New York City’s most prized real estate — curb space — alongside drivers, Citi Bike docks, streeteries, trash containers, and EV charging ports.
The second is scale: Three microhubs are no match for the nearly quarter-million people who live and work on the Upper West Side and order online once, twice, maybe even ten times a day. To actually make a dent in the congestion at the curb here or citywide, the city will need hundreds more.
In a press release from April, the city said “up to 36 locations” are planned for the pilot, which will last up to three years and include off-street sites on city property. But no additional locations have been announced since. Sources say the program is likely mired in the same holding pattern as most local policies for the foreseeable future, hinging on who occupies City Hall come January.
Potential sites, the press release added, must have the right conditions. Ideally, they should be near both people and distribution centers. The bike lanes leading to them have to be pretty damn good, too, if cargo bikes are coming to and fro.
Pairing truck traffic with tiny electric vehicles also comes with its own set of operational challenges. For example, a source said that the microhubs announced for Greenpoint and Clinton Hill have been paused out of fire-safety concerns related to charging or storing e-vehicles underneath the BQE. (Those sites are “still in development,” a spokesperson said.)
But perhaps the biggest obstacle is the process itself. How the city takes stock of the more than 3 million parking spots it’s said to have is a largely analog process, and a bureaucratic maze awaits any planner who wants to change how one gets used. Standing in front of Zabar’s one morning, Ali Barsamian, a vice-president at Populus.AI, a tech company working with the city, pointed at a “15-minute delivery” sign, meant to hold about three or four parking spots for quick deliveries and people dashing in and out of their cars to grab babka. “It could take someone hours to find out what parking on a street looks like,” Barsamian said. “So if they want to pitch changes, that’s a lot of wasted time.” That’s because a tangle of agencies have jurisdiction over the curb: The FDNY governs fire hydrants; the Department of Buildings oversees construction sites; the NYPD handles authorized vehicles; and the NYCDOT everything else, and there is no database that clearly lays out who governs what at each spot.
This is where a parallel effort to digitize the curb may speed things up. Barsamian’s company uses algorithms to consolidate all the data about each parking spot into a single interface that lists a spot’s specs, including its designation (“Metered”), its size (“10 feet”), and any time constraints (“No parking on Tuesdays and Fridays, 10 a.m.–12 p.m.”). The hope is that, with this information readily at hand, planners can more easily flip parking spots into other types of sites, like street seating, farmers’-market parking, or — in this case — microhubs.
The company has since digitized some 1,000 parking spots within the pilot’s boundaries, Barsamian said, which runs from West 72nd Street to West 86th, between Broadway and Central Park. The company also began mapping an estimated 20,000 more within the congestion-pricing zone — everything south of 60th Street, river to river, even if it’s unclear what the city will actually do with that data next.
Despite the slow pace of the pilot, it’s worth remembering that the city is playing catch-up here. Informal microhubs have been around for some time; anyone who has visited a Wegmans or Whole Foods or seen clusters of couriers gathered around an Amazon truck has seen one in action (otherwise known as “hurbs,” as this magazine has called them). Drivers and cargo bikers have found temporary fixes without waiting for parking signs to change. What the DOT microhubs are doing is formalizing what’s already happening, to some extent.
Two in the afternoon is prime time at the microhub set aside for Amazon on the corner of Broadway and West 77th Street. Once the truck arrives, packages are loaded onto the plastic package carts pulled by delivery workers and rolled off to their destinations.
There are detractors, of course. Zahar Ullah, who manages a newsstand nearby, says the microhub is a pain for patients with accessibility issues who arrive by car to a Medrite Urgent Care clinic there. “It’s good for packages, but bad for people,” Ullah says. “Parking here is already bad.” But the employee at the front desk inside told me she hardly noticed it.
Farther south on 73rd Street, the microhub for UPS was quieter, and deliveristas loitered there between orders. Angélica Vazquez, a street vendor nearby, said she didn’t mind the microhub; in fact, it boosts business. “Everyone likes to grab food when they’re here,” she tells me.
Uptown, Harden says the rollout has been bumpy. Enforcement is an issue: Cars regularly park in the microhubs, which sets off a game of bureaucratic telephone; the truck drivers call their companies, which then ring NYCDOT, which then alerts the cops, who then send a tow truck. That all takes time — which, for a truck idling in the middle of traffic during the morning rush hour in Manhattan, can feel like an eternity.
“Folks either don’t read the sign or don’t care,” Harden explains. “But if they get towed once, they never come back.” He says the issue has tapered off over time.
Still, it’s worth the trouble, he says. His site is the busiest of the three, with deliveries going out from sunup to sundown. And that’s just one corner, on one block, in one of the five boroughs. “There are just too many trucks right now,” he says. “We need these everywhere.”
Source link
