I mean if you genuinely wanna game theory this out, what's wrong with wheel barrows or carts?

Extreme labor inefficiency. Today Amazon's driver can deliver an order of magnitude more packages than a person with a wheel barrow could. There are 100,000+ Amazon drivers in the US. You'd need at least 1,000,000 people with wheel barrows.

That's true if we decide it's a good idea to continue to deliver millions of packages of small plastic goods every day. A big part of that is probably also due to the USA's massively isolating suburb design and poorly layed out roads.

So you think Amazon brings no value? I guess you never ordered anything from there?

I think in aggregate Amazon does more harm to our society than adds value. Its "value add" and service requires the degeneration of labor rights, a massive carbon footprint, and unethical shadow-UX practices on its own website.

Fine, delivery vehicles only, in the city center

How much of the "public property" mentioned above the "city center" is?

Does furniture deliver and maintenance machinery only fit down 6 lane highways, or do you think it might fit down a single lane road?

I don't think the person above is complaining about 6 lane highways.

These arguments always follow the same pattern:

>> I don't want to be brutally killed by a car on unsafe infrastructure

>> Oh yeah? Well how are you going to have a refrigerator delivered or get your sick grandmother to the hospital?

I'm not sure why. Maybe it's just hyper-logical thinking that it has to be all-or-nothing and implemented solely by force. But man, grandmothers and refrigerators are going to be just fine if we stop giving cars priority over people. Maybe better.

The idea is just not as obvious as you think. Take, for example, Manhattan in NY. If you compare the ratio of car/bus on its streets to a smaller city (I live in Seattle), it will be significantly lower. To the point that I am unsure removing cars altogether would change road conditions.

Now suppose we take all or majority of Manhattan's roads, let pedestrians in, and only allow buses, trucks, and utility vehicles. Suddenly buses are much slower than they are now, because the pedestrians have the right of the way.

Same way they do everywhere that gives pedestrians priority. On a truck that has more room to manuever because there aren't cars parked everywhere.