Brooklyn Boro

OPINION: Trucks: Can’t live with them, can’t live without them in NYC

July 28, 2017 By Uday Schultz Special to the Brooklyn Daily Eagle
Trucks side by side on Montague Street in Brooklyn. Eagle file photo
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Each day, hundreds of thousands of trucks move throughout our region. Vital to our lives, these vehicles carry almost all the goods that our region consumes. However, in the execution of their myriad duties, they crowd our roads, adding to the mayhem that is our infrastructure. Having been strangled with governmental neglect and crushed by metropolitan success, these assets are congested beyond imagination while their physical structures fall to pieces. Such overuse and rank neglect has precipitated a full-fledged war of priorities, one that asks streets and their users to handle Ubers without disrupting bike traffic, provide for platoons of automobiles without slowing buses and — most important to our story — accommodate a growing army of trucks without disrupting everyone else.

In the age of e-commerce and nutritional diasporization, trucks — already the method of conveyance for over 90 percent of goods in our metropolitan area —  are taking on an increasingly important role in our lives. While the goods and services these vehicles purvey are unquestionably beneficial, their impact on our region’s infrastructural health is unquestionably not so. To preserve the status quo, we must find methods to mitigate their negative effects, lest, with our unquenchable appetite for everything, their numbers drag us further toward bedlam.

Trucking can be easily broken down into two large categories: Long haul and local. In terms of their relevance to New York’s issues, the latter plays a much larger role — and presents a much larger challenge — in our city’s congestion issues. Long haul trucks — by merit of our region’s highways and truck routes being built to serve industrial areas — are usually able to stay off feeder streets until just before their destination, vastly mitigating their community impact.

However, local trips, despite their usually being carried out by smaller vehicles, have a vastly greater transportation impact. Not only does the nature of their mission — to deliver goods to stores, businesses and individuals — necessitate extensive utilization of minor streets, but their usage of the same has a larger proportional impact on used infrastructure. By constricting or even blocking traffic, occupying parking and unloading goods, a small truck on a minor street can have the same functional impact as a pileup on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.

This same inverse proportionality arises once again when it comes to resolvability. Many long-haul truck trips can be shifted across modes with programs like Cross Harbor, rerouted onto circumferential highways like I-287 or rescheduled to avoid times of peak congestion — all relatively simple fixes.

Local trips, on the other hand, pose a much more complex set of issues to resolve. Because our city is neither Venice nor comprehensively laced with freight rail tracks, local truck cargoes cannot be shifted onto trains or barges for delivery. Furthermore, because such trips are usually of short distance, and to wildly varied destinations, we cannot easily consolidate them onto designated trucking corridors without hindering their ability to deliver their goods.

Even the fix that superficially seems most workable — rescheduling truck trips — raises its own set of issues when applied to local deliveries. To begin with, many, if not most city merchants are not equipped to receive goods in the dead of night for lack of staff. Asking these day-time businesses to keep staff overnight would — for many of them — lessen any economic gains made by hastening delivery processes, disincentivizing them from implementing such a scheme. Alternatively, truckers could take over the role of the receiver’s staff, moving goods into the premises and the like. Sadly, this arrangement too faces barriers, as aside from adding to the already numerous duties of deliverymen, such an agreement would entail trust between transport providers and users, something that in many cases is lacking. Even if such relationships are built, almost all shipments conveyed directly to residents (think packages ordered online) will still have to be delivered within our waking hours, both for our gratification and for the security of the item itself. And lastly, assuming we reschedule long-haul truck trips to arrive in the area during the late evening or night, time sensitive goods (for example, Amazon packages, food and high-value consumer items) would have to be processed and delivered within a small window of six hours, or suffer a day of dwell in warehouses. Such a feat is in no way impossible: FedEx and UPS do it every night on a much larger scale, but asking every company in the area — from the lowliest vegetable merchant up — to implement high-speed sorting like that is, well, unrealistic.

All of this is not to say that we should not attempt temporal separation. Among the above-listed solutions, it is by far the most promising. However — and this must be emphasized — it is not a solution in of itself. Other things must be done.

If we continue as we do now, the number of trucks will eventually crest infrastructural space regardless of time of day. Consequently, part of the solution to our problem must be to reduce the number of vehicles on the road. As a result of a system where businesses are expected to distribute goods with their own private delivery fleet, many trucks run partially empty, an inefficiency compounded by their sheer numbers. If we can consolidate these cargoes moving to similar destinations into fewer, fuller trucks, we can not only reduce congestion by orders of magnitude, but also reduce environmental impact by physically lessening the number of vehicles being used.

In essence, what needs to happen — regardless of how it is implemented — is the removal of local distribution duties from the purview of individual companies. Similarly to the way public transportation optimizes the movement of people around cities by separating them from their private vehicles, the unification of freight transportation in the city would allow for network rationalization and functional optimization.

Businesses today construct their local truck networks to best serve solely their own needs, a task that obviously does not include thought towards the aid of competitors. If local freight transport is given over to a separate entity — one solely tasked with its execution — it can be planned through optimization, barriers of rivalry and self-interest having been removed. To centralize is to rationalize, and such is New York’s need.

There is no single silver bullet. Consolidating freight and rescheduling deliveries will not completely streamline truck traffic, and optimizing trucking will not solve congestion. What we must recognize is that gridlock is not solvable with one push. Every politician, every planner, every citizen — the author included — will try to sell the city their own “traffic management plan” or “decongestion proposal,” each targeting a specific facet of the issue. Truly, the solution lies in the sum of all points. It is the responsibility of us all, as voters and as New Yorkers, to see this — to not let the city rely on a single medicine. Trucking is just one use of our streets. To truly better their issues, to create a sustainable streetscape, the other warring factions — bicyclists, drivers, bus riders, pedestrians — will have to change too. Instead of fighting for dominance, these modes must engage in a sort of compact, all giving something to further a greater civic good.

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