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Guest Essay
Ms. Anderson is a freelance writer in Brooklyn.
Walking through New York City — America’s great harborer of people, culture and activity — can feel like strolling the world’s largest outdoor mall. Opportunities to acquire are everywhere, waiting either around the corner or at the end of a subway ride: exotic foods, knickknacks, records, books, medicine, tents, computers, sunglasses and everything else. It’s difficult to imagine a product one can’t buy in Manhattan, let alone the boroughs.
So why, oh, why are over 2.4 million packages delivered in this city every single weekday?
If those packages were people, they’d be metropolitan Austin, Texas. If they were stone blocks, they’d top the Great Pyramid of Giza. Even if each of those packages were as thin as the Postal Service’s smallest priority shipping box — an inch and three-quarters thick — when stacked like books, the daily pile would be as tall as 241 Empire State Buildings, one atop the other.
Since 2009, New Yorkers have been increasing their number of daily household deliveries like a rash. By 2017, it had tripled to more than 1.1 million. The figure swelled to 1.5 million by 2019. Then, within the four following years — even as deliveries decreased nationwide — the daily number grew by 60 percent.
This city isn’t equipped to accommodate the delivery trucks, cars and motorbikes needed to move such an amount — not without cost. Our traffic, pedestrians and already precarious air quality are suffering, and neither a measly monopoly lawsuit against Amazon nor government-authorized delivery bikes will be of much help. The package flood can be dammed only by its sources: lazy, track-pad-happy New Yorkers.
For a while, the pandemic was a valid excuse for buying online. To avoid spreading the virus, housebound Americans inflamed their long-growing dependency on e-commerce, with online sales increasing by 43 percent from 2019 to 2020. Now New York, like everywhere else, has moved on from social distancing: Subway ridership is up and mostly unmasked, and tourism’s certainly back. But our retail sector’s recovery lags the nation’s. New Yorkers — though largely stuck in small apartments you’d think they’d love to escape — have become too accustomed to the convenience of sedentary buying. Online shopping remains the default.
The Manhattan borough president, Mark Levine, put out a report last fall about the delivery surge, which “exacerbates congestion, road safety issues, air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, package waste and a variety of other quality-of-life concerns in Manhattan and throughout the city.” The main problem here is last mile delivery, the last step in the journey a package takes from a warehouse to a customer’s doorstep.
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