When a delivery company has a line item in its budget to cover parking tickets as a cost of doing business, it's already decided at the corporate level to disregard the law in favor of making a profit.
Some cities have dedicated package delivery spots which help, but that's far from universal and sometimes regular drivers will abuse them. Also, they may not be located near the location the package needs to be delivered.
Laws that penalize behavior that normal people frequently engage in don't get changed until the people who write the laws get bitten by them (which rarely happens for reasons outside the scope of this comment).
http://mroche.umwblogs.org/history-of-the-vhs/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act
I drove for Uber 11 hours a day six days a week for 10 months and never got a fine.
You may as well decry the budgeting for legal as saying the company wants to break the law.
Why? If you don’t park illegally you don’t get tickets. They aren’t random or accidental.
Incorrect; if you don't park illegally, you are less likely to be ticketed each time you park.
On an individual scale, this might result in never getting a ticket, on a large delivery company’s scale, it's pretty much guaranteed not to.
Downtowns address this problem with yellow commercial loading zones but those don’t really exist in residential neighborhoods.
It'll cost more than the current situation, sure, but it is an option.
Walking from a free parking spot to the delivery location is not included in the price. Unless all delivery companies are forced to follow the parking laws (for real) at the same time they will just go out of business.
The problem is that the end user don't know what quality of delivery they will get, so they choose the cheapest, and there is a race to the bottom, like flight tickets.
When comparing prices the end user doesn't know that they might be beaten off the plane by security to make room for a business class late arrival end user, so the risk is not priced in correctly ...
1. There's no quick conversion in the middle of the street. It's a curb, which would require hopping, which is nearly impossible for an ebike and a dangerously unstable maneuver anyway.
2. There are cars blocking visibility with the sidewalk. If you hop onto it, you might strike a pedestrian you didn't see. Perhaps a short one, such as a child, who are unpredictable anyway.
3. Going to the right of the truck is a great way to get doored in the 0" of clearance between the truck and other parked cars. If it's the truck, enjoy your guaranteed head injury from the truck door 3 feet off the ground.
4. Biking on the sidewalk is illegal in many cities. So is parking in the bike lane, for that matter. Expecting one party to break the law because of a failure to enforce a separate law is unreasonable.
The "no cars in the city" philosophy is not one without challenges or setbacks - getting rid of parking in sunset would suck, but it would motivate the creation of more and better public transit, which is a better solution than cars by nearly all marks.
More likely than getting rid of the bike lane, the laws surrounding it will be amended to allow deliveries.
So they shouldn’t stop there then. Deliver the last mile on foot or using a cart. If it’s too large for that I guess you can get some kind of permit like they do for construction.
Rhetoric is fun; it's easy to prove both a proposition and its opposite.
The only reason to have a lawyer is because you broke the law, got it.
Why? Doing everything correctly and within the law costs money.
I admittedly have no idea how these situations are handled by accounting, but that seems like it would be the solution to me.
But yes, the company looks at this like so:
* Option 1. Park in front of the building (illegally) and deliver the package. 2% chance of getting a $200 parking ticket.
* Option 2. Driver finds a legal spot, average time: 15 minutes. Add 20 minutes of walking time to the delivery. Requirement: 8x more delivery vehicles required to service the city.
Option 1 is much cheaper.
If the city wanted to make delivering parcels legally and safe for bicyclists practical, it could. But that would mean drastically lower income. So it doesn't.
It's obvious, this is how businesses operate.
I'm shure they could avoid doing a lot of those things, but blaming and punishing the truck driver is not fair.
But parking in the bike lane is not necessary a large fraction of the time. I always point out a convenient alternative parking spot when talking to drivers parked in the bike lane. It's not uncommon that the alternative spot is really no worse than the bike lane for the delivery driver. The problem seems to be that many drivers don't consider more than the most obvious parking spot, and that often ends up being the bike lane.
Also, don't underestimate the number of delivery drivers who hate cyclists and intentionally block the bike lane. Having talked to dozens of delivery drivers I can say some of them seem to genuinely hate cyclists.
As I recall the driver went through the small gap I left, though not without getting fairly irritated.
Bike vs. car flamewars are surprisingly close to the nastiest things we see here. Not to mention tedious.
Live and let live.
The drivers deliver the shit you buy online.
Imagine there's no bike lane and you ride on the street, or when you wanna ride more relaxed, you ride on the sidewalk.
It's not a problem either way if everybody is somewhat relaxed. But with your mindset, everyone's against everyone.
Phew...
It just riddles me.
If you were in a car, you would be the type of person that honks at cyclist because in their mindset, it's illegal.
Common misconception. Riding on the sidewalk is considerably more dangerous than riding in the street. While you are less likely to be hit from behind, you are much more likely to be hit by drivers turning.
> If you were in a car, you would be the type of person that honks at cyclist because in their mindset, it's illegal.
The difference is that blocking the bike lane is typically illegal (and dangerous to cyclists), and riding a bike on the road is typically legal (and at most irritating to drivers). The two are not equivalent.
It's illegal in 8 states; unclear in 18; even if it was illegal in all of those it would be a slim majority, not “almost every state”.
https://bikeleague.org/content/bike-law-university-sidewalk-...
That being said, far too many assume it's illegal to ride on the road, and "share the road" signs don't seem to effectively correct that misconception. I've even heard of drivers telling cyclists to ride on the sidewalk when they're already riding in a bike lane...
That being said, and as others have stated, riding on the sidewalk is not illegal in many areas, though it's less safe in most.
Said nothing about slashing, that's permanent damage.
This isn't the only time you see this sort of selfish behavior from delivery companies. As a cyclist I commonly encounter delivery trucks parked in the bike lane. This is a common problem: http://upshatescyclists.com/
If you call UPS or Fedex you'll often hear things like "This shouldn't happen." But the drivers are basically incentivized to break the law, regardless of "company policy". They don't have much time per package, so if blocking a bike lane saves them 10 seconds, they don't care if it is really dangerous for others.
Given this knowledge, I hypothesized that an effective way to make a delivery driver avoid the bike lane would be to slow them down if they park in the bike lane. I did once try to block a UPS driver from exiting their vehicle as a test. I recall that I said something like "You're blocking me, so I'm blocking you. You can park over there if you want a legal spot."
It wasn't the worst reaction I've seen from a UPS driver, but it was among the worst. Not recommended, but if enough cyclists did this then I suspect delivery drivers would start to avoid the bike lane.