Yesterday, Sunday 1/25, the front sections didn't arrive at the distribution center until 5:00!
They're supposed to be there by 4ish. It's not uncommon for them to get there later than usual thereby monkeying us up (such as happened on 1/18), but I don't know if I recall them ever being later than 4:30 before, until yesterday. So, the way that they bungled it yesterday has earned itself a blog entry.
"The good news", as the Times' employee said to us as we were waiting, was that we'd therefore have until 8:30 (as opposed to the usual 7:30 deadline) to complete our deliveries. That meant that for the houses that we'd be delivering to between 7:30 and 8:30, we wouldn't have to worry about the $1.50 that, under normal conditions, the Times would clip us for each paper that a customer happens to call and report not having at their doorstep.
Well that's nice, but it's not the only thing.
"It'll still make me look bad", I remarked. Probably only a certain percentage of the customers who haven't gotten their paper by 7:30, call the Times to say so by 8:29. And even if that's a higher percentage than I think it is, all of those $1.50 charges would arguably still only be chump change compared to all of the _tips_ that I've gotten partly for _not_ being late (or at least not being late very often, at least not to any more than the very last street or two). Therefore, what I was mainly thinking about was how all of the customers on the whole last third of the route would simply _see_ me delivering late and perhaps think that I must have drank the night before or something.
Well in _another_ twist, I _had_ drunk the night before!
(It was with certain neighbors who invite me to do so, fortunately not very often. I was a teetaler until I was 28, and even today, when I'm by myself I can make a 30-pack last months. But this was one of the 30-pack-a-_day_ crowds that I had previously _told_ that I can't accept any more of the _Saturday_-night invitations of. They called me up anyhow - with friends like that, who needs enemies? - but, this time it just so happened that I had taken an amply long snooze on Saturday afternoon, plus I was two months behind on the inside dirt from this swamp-boundary faction of the neighbors; so, I accepted. Hmmm, time to see if I can get the caller ID working again.)
The hangover _might_ help explain why I forgot to stick a few of the front sections in.
Another factor (and the one that I prefer to use as my _official_ excuse) was that this was also the first Sunday of the Times' disappointing joining of the currently-popular-in-the-newspaper-industry, candy-bar-inflation trick of making its papers narrower. I think the resulting unfamiliar-to-me shape of the papers played a significant role in throwing me off, because I'm _very_ familiar with my big grey plastic containers when they're stuffed with bagged papers that are in the container vertically _and_ with the tops of them 1 1/2" closer to the top of the container than they were yesterday: It means, "Front sections not stuck in yet."
Plus, it's not very often that I stick the front sections in _during_ the delivery like I did yesterday, so I was out of practice in that connection. It seems that most carriers do it that way, but I largely stopped doing it that way after about the first half of 2007 when it dawned on me that I can save a whole bunch of idling by sticking all 180 of them in at the distribution center before leaving there.
In addition to saving a bunch of idling, I figured out equally early on that there are also several other advantages to having all of the papers assembled before leaving the distribution center. Right off the bat, it minimizes the disturbing of the people sleeping in the houses, because you're usually stopped directly in front of a house during the extra seconds that it takes to stick the front section in.
In early 2007 when I was still sticking them in while underway, I ameliorated that factor a little bit by sticking as many of them in as possible in the rare places along the route where I could stop without being directly in front of any house. The best such place - and I became a fixture there for several months - is just across the Morgan Highway from the route, near the library.
Speaking of that early-2007 period when I was a fixture at that spot, that was also the setting of one of the stories that, in "Hey snowplow drivers - _I_ rule this hour", I promised to unleash about how "other elements of the ruling-of-the-streets-at-this-hour subculture were much quicker [than a certain snowplow driver] to get used to my presence therein". Here's that story:
Clarks Summit is thick with cops, and sure enough, it didn't take long for one of them to pull up to me to check me out as I was sitting there (near the library) sticking the front sections in. Both then, and a month or so earlier on Sunset when a cop did the same thing but even more briefly, the cops were satisfied the _instant_ they saw that I was handling a bunch of newspapers, and they promptly drove away.
I could have probably had an old _sticker_ (which, later, I _did_ for a while, with otherwise-surprising-for-Clarks-Summit impunity) and they wouldn't have looked long enough to notice it; that's how satisfied they were to simply see that I was a paper boy. Nor has any cop ever checked me out in the whole going-on-two-years since.
Clarks Summit cops leave paper carriers alone. They leave us alone even when we're doing screwball things like being on the left side of the road. Yesterday, I had just done at least _three_ violations, in full view of one (and at the pre-dawn hour that it still was, he didn't have anything other than me _to_ watch, during the whole half minute that I'd been doing them), when he drove right by me: I had operated on the left side of the road _at_ an _intersection_ (which in my opinion ought to make it count as two violations instead of one), _opened_ _federal_ _mailboxes_ (which, I was always taught, is a federal crime, although, for the handful of customers that specify that we do just that, I just assume that that's an exception), and failed to signal.
(I'm also a big promoter of _obeying_ traffic laws, especially at http://www.newmilfordbike.com/Triad.htm , but I'll be doing enough spouting of that on this blog soon enough. Stay tuned.)
About once every several months, I happen to see a cop make a quick pass through the distribution center parking lot when many of us are there screwing around with our papers. I guess that's one of their various methodologies of keeping up with what the various carriers' vehicles look like so that they can leave them alone.
The only time that I attracted a cop enough for him to "really" check me out while I was doing anything having to do with the route, wasn't even during any delivery. Rather, it was in the middle of a weekday, in early February 2007, when I was mapping the route out by bike in preparation to do my first delivery that Sunday (as a substitute, which was how I started). I was taking _real_ long (peering at house numbers, stopping to take notes here and there, and then going back to double-check, etc.), which of course, on any suburban cul-de-sac where one is a stranger, was _asking_ to have a cop check me out. But it was fun: The cop instantly understood my explanation of what I was doing, and the rest of the conversation was about things like cycling which, as it turned out, was one of his hobbies, and where could he buy a headlight like mine, etc.
I've done the majority of my subsequent, more-detailed mappings out of the route (a sporadic, ongoing process) by foot, because I quickly learned that that's a much better speed for taking notes about house spacings, etc., than cycling speed.
So anyhow, I was boasting to y'all about how I ameliorated the extent to which I look like a marauder, by usually (since mid-2007) sticking all 180 of the front sections into the bags before leaving the distribution center.
The rare occasions when I don't, are generally when weather conditions are such that sitting in the cab of the pickup truck to stick them in (as opposed to standing outside, which I find more efficient) becomes tempting even for me.
And yesterday, with the temperature a little bit below 0 F, was one of those times. _Then_ it's _nice_ to wastefully idle the engine during the time of sticking them in!
Not that that factor alone was enough to give me any excuse, in my opinion, to do so. The addition, rather, of a substantial amount of wind, for example - even at much warmer temperatures - would have provided a more _valid_ excuse to not try to stick them in from standing outside (due to the requirement of wasting, above a certain wind speed, too much time and not-always-successful effort preventing the papers from becoming airplanes), but that excuse didn't happen yesterday either. It was only a _calm_ subzero temperature yesterday.
Rather, some additional factors - the ones that provided a _valid_ excuse - were introduced by the fact that the front sections arrived so late:
First, I've never tried to do arithmetic to figure out which of the two methodologies saves _time_. I've long suspected that my sticking-all-180-front-sections-in-before-starting method might take a hair longer, due to the fact that I'm theoretically handling each one of the papers an extra time (compared to if I were sticking each front section in right in the same fluid motion as when I'm grabbing that paper to run to a house with it - but it's probably unrealistic for that to very often all happen in such a fluid motion, hence my use of the word "theoretically").
(And most carriers, who use cars rather than pickup trucks, probably don't have _room_ in their vehicles for such extra shuffling of stuff around. I suspect that that - coupled with the fact that many of them are more willing than I am to do a whole bunch of idling of their engines, such as in particular, yesterday just to be warm while waiting the extra hour for the papers even though the distribution-center building that some of them finally came into to whine about the heat of is _very_ reasonably-well heated in my opinion! - might explain why most of them use the sticking-the-front-sections-in-while-underway method.)
I think I more or less discovered yesterday that the sticking-the-front-sections-in-while-underway method _isn't_ any iota faster, at least for me. The fact that I still took until about 8:33 to finish would seem to indicate this. Hmmm, maybe my theoretically-double-handling, normal method is just that - "theoretically" only, on the double-handling part - and my elimination, if any, of "double handling" yesterday was cancelled out by the simple awkwardness that I find in the position of sitting inside a vehicle (which requires swiveling back and forth 90 degrees to stick each front section in) as opposed to standing outside it to stick the front sections in.
My second deciding factor for using the sticking-the-front-sections-in-while-underway method yesterday, was to take advantage of the fact that getting the front sections late _didn't_ mean that I had to do all _parts_ of the route late. In particular, the route's one high-traffic street, W. Grove, is always wise to be finished with as early as possible, before traffic starts picking up and making it more time consuming to do. The same principle applies to when 7:30 rolls around: If I know that I'm not going to be finished the delivery yet when 7:30 rolls around, then it's ideal to save some of the front sections to stick in after 7:30 (thereby, _before_ 7:30, spending a little less time sticking sections in and more time delivering), because that way my embarrassment of finishing after 7:30 is confined to in front of a minimum number of the customers.
But, like I said, I _prefer_ sticking all of the front sections in before beginning the delivery. And a too-obvious-to-mention-in-any-of-the-above, additional advantage of doing so is - you guessed it! - it virtually eliminates all of the possible ways of _forgetting_ to stick one in.
Only about once that I happen to know of, had I ever forgotten to stick one in before yesterday. (It was in 2007 sometime, and I saw it on the Times' sheet the next weekend: A certain customer had "Sections A thru D missing." "A thru D" is the "front" section that I'm talking about.) But yesterday, I think there was around _14_ papers that I forgot to stick it into!
Fortunately, I caught myself just after 9 of them, so I knew which houses 9 of them probably were. But, being in a hurry as I was, I decided not to go right back to those 9 houses but rather, to wait until after finishing the delivery (when it'd be daylight also, a preferred time for making an otherwise-suspicious-looking _second_ visit to a house) to go back to them and deliver those front sections.
It was between about 8:33 and 8:45 when I finally did so; so, I must have looked _real_ incompetent: About half of those 9 customers had already taken their paper inside, so I had to putter around doing things like ringing their doorbells, with success only in some of the cases, to let them know that I'd finally "remembered" to bring their front section.
To top it off, one of them informed me that I'd forgotten his _whole_ paper! (I _think_ it was only at _that_ house that I was _that_ stupid, based on my lack, as usual, of any measurable number - besides one, which I gave him - of leftover inside sections.)
In that connection, I'm happy to report that it's been a long time since I've missed more than about one house every month or two and that it's usually been more like two months. Back when I was a newbie, I missed at least a couple of houses per average week.
I found out an hour later where it was that I'd forgotten one more of the front sections: The customer called my cellphone when, fortunately, I was still in town and could bring him one promptly. (I usually _am_ still in town for a long time after finishing the delivery, due to my McDonald's habit, and therefore, I like it when customers call me.)
I hereby apologize in advance to whatever 4 or so (based on the number of front sections that I had left over) customers it was that, as I'll learn in detail on the Times' sheet next weekend, I forgot to give front sections to. I hope that they called the Times, and that the managers delivered them as part of their routine cleanings-up after us bums.
I've often pipe dreamed about how, one of these times when I know that the front sections are going to be late, I could perhaps get a head start by delivering just the inside sections to a certain chunk of the route, and then come back later to deliver the front sections, with a goal of thereby delivering everything including the front sections within the deadline (because the front sections by themselves are much lighter and could therefore probably be delivered fast). But _if_ I were to ever try that, just one of the challenges that would be involved would be that I'd probably want to first print up a bunch of copies of a simple note, _saying_ what I'm doing, to stick into each inside section (that's just one of the disadvantages of this scheme: just sticking _these_ in would take a big chunk of time) so that early-rising customers would know that the front sections are on the way.
Speaking of the fat inside sections (which are available for carriers to prepare on Saturday): I usually just sit back in Lenoxville on Saturday and let my more-local-to-Clarks-Summit, Route Associate do that "getting tomorrow's paper today" part of the job, a big chunk of which must consist of worrying about when _those_ sections (frequently, the last I checked) arrive at the distribution center much later on _Saturday_ than they're supposed to.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Sunday, January 11, 2009
Hey snowplow drivers - _I_ rule this hour!
No potshot at snowplow drivers is intended in the above title, except to the extent that I happen to be using one of them as the butt of my sociological observation for the day. I thank snowplow drivers for the much-more-cleared-than-expected surfaces that helped me finish not _too_ embarrassingly late this morning.
The "than expected" part, incidentally, was due to the fact that we only got perhaps 3 inches between yesterday afternoon and the delivery time this morning, instead of the 6 to 10 that everybody including this blog had been predicting.
The fodder for the following sociological observation happened as I was preparing to do the closest-to-Sunset half of the main section of Sleepy Hollow by foot.
This morning, I was, for the time being, back to not having the bike along. I'd left it at home because it was broke down.
The freewheel of it had started to fall apart, and I'd waited until the last minute to try yanking another one off of one of the umpteen bike wheels that I've got lying around. At 11 pm last night, I gave up on that after a few minutes, when the fact stared me straight in the face that getting some iota of sleep before the delivery was more important.
Nor did I try any iota to fulfill my pipe dream of bringing X-C skis along (it'd probably take a lot more snow for them to become advantageous for even one segment).
So anyhow, this morning, I was doing Sleepy Hollow (or to nitpick, the "main" section of it, i.e. the section that parallels Woodland Way) the way that I'd been most routinely doing it for basically the second half of 2008: I come in off the Morgan Highway (after doing W. Grove), do several houses by motoring on my way in to the Woodland Way splitoff, and then: Just before and just after doing Woodland Way by motoring, I do the "main" section of Sleepy Hollow (which has about 16 subscribers) by foot by doing an 8-paper armload from either end.
This requires (unlike the cycling method that I boasted about earlier for this whole Sleepy-Hollow-to-Hilltop neighborhood) doing at least some motoring north along Sunset after Woodland Way, so as to be incidentally cruising past an efficient parking spot from which to walk onto the half of Sleepy Hollow closest to Sunset and do that second 8-paper armload for Sleepy Hollow. (I do all this on my way to a still-further-north-on-Sunset parking spot from which to do _Hilltop_ in _one_ walk. I do that one with a shoulder-bag-full in _addition_ to an armload, because it's a 15-subscriber dead-end).
Be patient; I'm getting to the "sociological observation" part: This morning, just after I'd finished Woodland Way and as I was approaching the spot on Sunset where I park to do the second Sleepy-Hollow 8-paper armload, I observed - in front of me a couple hundred feet further north on Sunset - a snowplow going back and forth by backing up, each time, to closer and closer to where I was. So, just for in case he might want to eventually come all the way back and plow a little looking-like-it-needed-plowing area where I was parking, I decided to only run to _one_ house on Sleepy Hollow, namely the one closest to where was parking, and then reluctantly motor a little bit into Sleepy Hollow to park and run to the other 7 houses. That way I'd be giving the snowplow driver a maximum number of options of places to expand his plowing operation into while I'm doing the 7 houses, without my pickup truck being in his way.
Well, after I did the above-mentioned one house and was getting back in to begin motoring to my more-accommodating-of-him parking spot, he _did_ back the whole rest of the distance back to where I'd parked.
Except, as I would soon deduce, his reason for backing up there wasn't to plow that area. Nor did he do any plowing in Sleepy Hollow, which he followed me a couple hundred feet or so into. Nor did he do any plowing in the driveway that he finally turned around in to go back to Sunset and mind his own business - after, as I'd by then deduced, watching me all that time expecting to perhaps catch a marauder.
Well here's the story of how his expectation to see me remove something from somebody's property was self-fulfilling:
It was entertaining to watch how the time that he picked to do his longest-duration single closer-to-zero-than-three mph (obviously-watching-of-me-with-his-headlights - as if a thief, even if there _are_ any that aren't going to _bed_ by this last hour before dawn, would conduct his profession under the glare of headlights!) segment of his little diversion, was as I was picking up six objects and removing them from somebody's property.
He _hadn't_ seen me _drop_ those same objects there 20 or so seconds earlier. Therefore, as he watched me pick them up, remove them from that property and go to the next property with them (my mode for the first few feet of which was by aerobic-walking, ala Mort Malkin - being careful not to transition too quickly into my preferred-in-such-lightly-loaded-situations modes, namely jogging or running - due to the need for caution regarding the concept of "suicide by busybody"), it must have taken him a while to see that those six objects were papers and that I was a paper boy.
Needless to say, that busybodying snowplow driver was probably the _reason_ that I dropped those papers _and_ did several other things that must have made it be, overall, quite a show for him. Such as: I forgot about the presence of a 3' drop-off as I was running from that property onto the next (the only time in my going-on-two-years of running across this route's various stone walls that I ever fell while doing so; so, go figure).
I'll save the several older stories for until I get around to unleashing them sometime, about how much faster other elements of the ruling-the-streets-at-this-hour subculture got used to my presence therein.
The "than expected" part, incidentally, was due to the fact that we only got perhaps 3 inches between yesterday afternoon and the delivery time this morning, instead of the 6 to 10 that everybody including this blog had been predicting.
The fodder for the following sociological observation happened as I was preparing to do the closest-to-Sunset half of the main section of Sleepy Hollow by foot.
This morning, I was, for the time being, back to not having the bike along. I'd left it at home because it was broke down.
The freewheel of it had started to fall apart, and I'd waited until the last minute to try yanking another one off of one of the umpteen bike wheels that I've got lying around. At 11 pm last night, I gave up on that after a few minutes, when the fact stared me straight in the face that getting some iota of sleep before the delivery was more important.
Nor did I try any iota to fulfill my pipe dream of bringing X-C skis along (it'd probably take a lot more snow for them to become advantageous for even one segment).
So anyhow, this morning, I was doing Sleepy Hollow (or to nitpick, the "main" section of it, i.e. the section that parallels Woodland Way) the way that I'd been most routinely doing it for basically the second half of 2008: I come in off the Morgan Highway (after doing W. Grove), do several houses by motoring on my way in to the Woodland Way splitoff, and then: Just before and just after doing Woodland Way by motoring, I do the "main" section of Sleepy Hollow (which has about 16 subscribers) by foot by doing an 8-paper armload from either end.
This requires (unlike the cycling method that I boasted about earlier for this whole Sleepy-Hollow-to-Hilltop neighborhood) doing at least some motoring north along Sunset after Woodland Way, so as to be incidentally cruising past an efficient parking spot from which to walk onto the half of Sleepy Hollow closest to Sunset and do that second 8-paper armload for Sleepy Hollow. (I do all this on my way to a still-further-north-on-Sunset parking spot from which to do _Hilltop_ in _one_ walk. I do that one with a shoulder-bag-full in _addition_ to an armload, because it's a 15-subscriber dead-end).
Be patient; I'm getting to the "sociological observation" part: This morning, just after I'd finished Woodland Way and as I was approaching the spot on Sunset where I park to do the second Sleepy-Hollow 8-paper armload, I observed - in front of me a couple hundred feet further north on Sunset - a snowplow going back and forth by backing up, each time, to closer and closer to where I was. So, just for in case he might want to eventually come all the way back and plow a little looking-like-it-needed-plowing area where I was parking, I decided to only run to _one_ house on Sleepy Hollow, namely the one closest to where was parking, and then reluctantly motor a little bit into Sleepy Hollow to park and run to the other 7 houses. That way I'd be giving the snowplow driver a maximum number of options of places to expand his plowing operation into while I'm doing the 7 houses, without my pickup truck being in his way.
Well, after I did the above-mentioned one house and was getting back in to begin motoring to my more-accommodating-of-him parking spot, he _did_ back the whole rest of the distance back to where I'd parked.
Except, as I would soon deduce, his reason for backing up there wasn't to plow that area. Nor did he do any plowing in Sleepy Hollow, which he followed me a couple hundred feet or so into. Nor did he do any plowing in the driveway that he finally turned around in to go back to Sunset and mind his own business - after, as I'd by then deduced, watching me all that time expecting to perhaps catch a marauder.
Well here's the story of how his expectation to see me remove something from somebody's property was self-fulfilling:
It was entertaining to watch how the time that he picked to do his longest-duration single closer-to-zero-than-three mph (obviously-watching-of-me-with-his-headlights - as if a thief, even if there _are_ any that aren't going to _bed_ by this last hour before dawn, would conduct his profession under the glare of headlights!) segment of his little diversion, was as I was picking up six objects and removing them from somebody's property.
He _hadn't_ seen me _drop_ those same objects there 20 or so seconds earlier. Therefore, as he watched me pick them up, remove them from that property and go to the next property with them (my mode for the first few feet of which was by aerobic-walking, ala Mort Malkin - being careful not to transition too quickly into my preferred-in-such-lightly-loaded-situations modes, namely jogging or running - due to the need for caution regarding the concept of "suicide by busybody"), it must have taken him a while to see that those six objects were papers and that I was a paper boy.
Needless to say, that busybodying snowplow driver was probably the _reason_ that I dropped those papers _and_ did several other things that must have made it be, overall, quite a show for him. Such as: I forgot about the presence of a 3' drop-off as I was running from that property onto the next (the only time in my going-on-two-years of running across this route's various stone walls that I ever fell while doing so; so, go figure).
I'll save the several older stories for until I get around to unleashing them sometime, about how much faster other elements of the ruling-the-streets-at-this-hour subculture got used to my presence therein.
Friday, January 9, 2009
6 to 10
...and the virtually-guaranteeing-of-no-cleared-surfaces timing of it: _Ending_ around 7 am Sunday!
If that prediction from the weathermen is correct, this should be one of the most bonafide "teahounds need not apply" deliveries yet. Hmmm, I wonder if I should get out the cross-country skis...
If that prediction from the weathermen is correct, this should be one of the most bonafide "teahounds need not apply" deliveries yet. Hmmm, I wonder if I should get out the cross-country skis...
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Sunday 1/4/09 Delivery Report
I'm happy to report success in adhering to my New Year's resolution of beginning to more aggressively increase the percentage of the delivery that I do by bike. This morning, out of 183 active subscribers' houses, I did 75 by bike, in 5 bikeloads launched from the pickup truck at 3 points along the route as follows:
From parking spot #1 (on W. Grove between Woodside & Woodridge, parked there from 5:08 to 5:26):
Bikeload #1, Woodridge & north slope of Woodside, 13 papers.
From parking spot #2 (near PennDOT building; parked there from 5:31 to 6:04):
Bikeload #2, Wildwood (& adjacent part of W. Grove) & Sunset, 13 papers.
Bikeload #3, Vosburg, 18 papers.
From parking spot #3 (intersection of Sleepy Hollow and Woodland Way; parked there from 6:15 to 6:48):
Bikeload #4, Sleepy Hollow east of the parking spot, 16 papers.
Bikeload #5, Hilltop, 15 papers.
That's the highest percentage of this route that I've delivered to by bike yet. The closest that I'd gotten to delivering to that many streets by bike before had been the time in September that I boasted about in "About the name of this blog". That time, I'd only done 4 of those approximate bikeloads (specifically, the ones that I call bikeloads #2 thru #5 above), and one of the several reasons that I didn't bring my bike again until 12/21 was that I'd parked in a poor spot in September to do Vosburg & Sunset; the existence of a good parking place near Vosburg & Sunset hadn't yet dawned on me.
An ideal motor-vehicle parking spot on a paper route such as this ("parking", to a paper carrier, meaning parking long enough to shut off the engine and do more than, say, 6 houses by a non-motorized mode) is:
1) One where you're not too directly in front of any house, so as not to disturb people. Such spots are rare on this route.
2) One that minimizes the route's motoring milage by not being a ways into a branch of the route that you're doing by a non-motorized mode.
But in early December, it finally dawned on me that there _is_ a good parking place near Vosburg, and it didn't take long at all after that for a nice improved version of the _whole_ logistical puzzle to fit together. In particular, it dawned on me that with this good parking spot in _addition_ to the other ones, I'd only need carrying capacity on my bike for 15 or so, not 25 or more, papers. And that helped inspire me to finally get off my duff and build such capacity onto one of my spare bikes.
The spare bike that I fixed up in time for the 12/21 delivery and will probably keep on using on the deliveries, is a 1980s-or-so Kabuki Bridgestone that Phil Pass gave me a few years ago. For front panniers, I zapped up, with a Sawzall (the saber saw would have been more precise but I couldn't find it; it was already Sunday 12/21 and my 3 am departure time was looming), two of the Yaffa plastic file boxes that I'd bought at Wegman's a few years ago, and bolted them onto the front rack (with the strongest part, which had been the bottom, in).
I cut each one of them to a size and shape that would allow quick insertion of either a few papers loose, or a plastic cat-litter container with a few papers in it. That way, to facilitate loading the bike without having to spend time handling the papers more than the one time that I handle them while sticking the front sections into all of them at the distribution center, I load, _while_ sticking the front sections in at the distribution center, one load loose in the butchered Yaffa boxes, plus a whole bunch of "refill cartridges" consisting of cat-litter-container loads.
The number of papers in each front pannier, based on the size of the papers on an average Sunday, will probably be 5 in a cat-litter container or 6 loose in the butchered Yaffa box (I toyed around for many months sticking average-size Sunday papers into various such types of containers before getting around to putting a version on a bike). But for the short time that I've been actually bringing the bike along on the delivery, the papers have been smaller than usual, so it's been more like 6 and 7.
The decision of how much payload capacity to have on the rear, was made _for_ me when I noticed that this bike has a shorter wheelbase than I'm used to having (that's part of the reason I chose it to fix up as my paper-delivery bike: it can turn around on a short radius at the top of driveways, etc.), and that therefore, too big of a container of papers on the rear would have too much of its weight aft of the rear axle. Well, with my just-hatched plan of how I wouldn't _need_ to carry that big of loads _anyhow_, this was no problem! I simply dug out a pair of "real" rear panniers (i.e. bought'n ones) that my brother-in-law had given me a few months ago. These accommodate the carrying, with the weight _not_ too far to the rear, of 2 (average-size) or 3 or 4 (the size that they've been for about the last 3 Sundays) papers on each side of the rear wheel.
The time that the _whole_ delivery took this morning (and the way that I measure it anymore is starting from leaving the distribution center with all of the front sections stuck into the bags), was from 4:49 to 7:39.
Oops, I finished 9 minutes later than you're supposed to; how embarrassing. Well that's why I'm not trying yet to do more streets by bike than I am. I _think_ that this system, done right, can be as fast or faster than the motoring-and-running system, but I'm not sure exactly. And _if_ it's even a little bit slower (in which case I'd still advocate it, because for example, it helps vary what muscle groups you use), then I want to only do it when I start early enough, etc. so as not to give cycling a bad name.
But there's plenty of room for improvement: Right off the bat, notice that I wasted time noting the times. That'll add a minute every time.
Then some minutes could no doubt be shaved off by reducing the size of bikeload #2 by 3 papers and bikeload #4 by 2 papers, and adding those 5 papers to bikeload #5. That'd make bikeload #5 a big load, but it'd knock a few hundred feet off the one substantial requiring-of-extra-bike-rides-along-it-just-to-get-another-load stretch (namely Sleepy Hollow and the part of Sunset between Sleepy Hollow and Hilltop).
Simply parking near Hilltop instead of at the far end of Sleepy Hollow, to do Hilltop, would be another way to eliminate the above backtracking problem, and parking near Hilltop is what I did for most of the last year or however long ago it was that I started usually doing Hilltop by foot. However, with cycling, not just Hilltop but this _whole_ general part of the route can be done without motoring, and therefore, "ideal-parking-spot factor #2" above (i.e. not wasting unnecessary motor travel to get to the parking spot; the nearest "necessary" motoring is along Woodland Way because that moves the load towards the next part of the route, namely Grandview, via Oakmont) comes into play.
My pipe dream that I boasted about earlier of building an instant-launch device (instant launching of the bike from the pickup truck, that is) seems to be continuing to take me a while to get around to doing. The time consumption of unloading the bike from the pickup truck and then loading it back on after doing each set of bikeloads, is considerable, but for now, it's less unacceptable than I thought it would be. It seems to get ameliorated by the fact that I've limited the number of bike-launch sites so as to, in the case of two of the three parking spots, do more than one bikeload per parking spot.
But stay tuned, because I have it mapped out how to do more like 130 of the houses in 8 bikeloads, whenever I get all these time-consumption kinks worked out.
From parking spot #1 (on W. Grove between Woodside & Woodridge, parked there from 5:08 to 5:26):
Bikeload #1, Woodridge & north slope of Woodside, 13 papers.
From parking spot #2 (near PennDOT building; parked there from 5:31 to 6:04):
Bikeload #2, Wildwood (& adjacent part of W. Grove) & Sunset, 13 papers.
Bikeload #3, Vosburg, 18 papers.
From parking spot #3 (intersection of Sleepy Hollow and Woodland Way; parked there from 6:15 to 6:48):
Bikeload #4, Sleepy Hollow east of the parking spot, 16 papers.
Bikeload #5, Hilltop, 15 papers.
That's the highest percentage of this route that I've delivered to by bike yet. The closest that I'd gotten to delivering to that many streets by bike before had been the time in September that I boasted about in "About the name of this blog". That time, I'd only done 4 of those approximate bikeloads (specifically, the ones that I call bikeloads #2 thru #5 above), and one of the several reasons that I didn't bring my bike again until 12/21 was that I'd parked in a poor spot in September to do Vosburg & Sunset; the existence of a good parking place near Vosburg & Sunset hadn't yet dawned on me.
An ideal motor-vehicle parking spot on a paper route such as this ("parking", to a paper carrier, meaning parking long enough to shut off the engine and do more than, say, 6 houses by a non-motorized mode) is:
1) One where you're not too directly in front of any house, so as not to disturb people. Such spots are rare on this route.
2) One that minimizes the route's motoring milage by not being a ways into a branch of the route that you're doing by a non-motorized mode.
But in early December, it finally dawned on me that there _is_ a good parking place near Vosburg, and it didn't take long at all after that for a nice improved version of the _whole_ logistical puzzle to fit together. In particular, it dawned on me that with this good parking spot in _addition_ to the other ones, I'd only need carrying capacity on my bike for 15 or so, not 25 or more, papers. And that helped inspire me to finally get off my duff and build such capacity onto one of my spare bikes.
The spare bike that I fixed up in time for the 12/21 delivery and will probably keep on using on the deliveries, is a 1980s-or-so Kabuki Bridgestone that Phil Pass gave me a few years ago. For front panniers, I zapped up, with a Sawzall (the saber saw would have been more precise but I couldn't find it; it was already Sunday 12/21 and my 3 am departure time was looming), two of the Yaffa plastic file boxes that I'd bought at Wegman's a few years ago, and bolted them onto the front rack (with the strongest part, which had been the bottom, in).
I cut each one of them to a size and shape that would allow quick insertion of either a few papers loose, or a plastic cat-litter container with a few papers in it. That way, to facilitate loading the bike without having to spend time handling the papers more than the one time that I handle them while sticking the front sections into all of them at the distribution center, I load, _while_ sticking the front sections in at the distribution center, one load loose in the butchered Yaffa boxes, plus a whole bunch of "refill cartridges" consisting of cat-litter-container loads.
The number of papers in each front pannier, based on the size of the papers on an average Sunday, will probably be 5 in a cat-litter container or 6 loose in the butchered Yaffa box (I toyed around for many months sticking average-size Sunday papers into various such types of containers before getting around to putting a version on a bike). But for the short time that I've been actually bringing the bike along on the delivery, the papers have been smaller than usual, so it's been more like 6 and 7.
The decision of how much payload capacity to have on the rear, was made _for_ me when I noticed that this bike has a shorter wheelbase than I'm used to having (that's part of the reason I chose it to fix up as my paper-delivery bike: it can turn around on a short radius at the top of driveways, etc.), and that therefore, too big of a container of papers on the rear would have too much of its weight aft of the rear axle. Well, with my just-hatched plan of how I wouldn't _need_ to carry that big of loads _anyhow_, this was no problem! I simply dug out a pair of "real" rear panniers (i.e. bought'n ones) that my brother-in-law had given me a few months ago. These accommodate the carrying, with the weight _not_ too far to the rear, of 2 (average-size) or 3 or 4 (the size that they've been for about the last 3 Sundays) papers on each side of the rear wheel.
The time that the _whole_ delivery took this morning (and the way that I measure it anymore is starting from leaving the distribution center with all of the front sections stuck into the bags), was from 4:49 to 7:39.
Oops, I finished 9 minutes later than you're supposed to; how embarrassing. Well that's why I'm not trying yet to do more streets by bike than I am. I _think_ that this system, done right, can be as fast or faster than the motoring-and-running system, but I'm not sure exactly. And _if_ it's even a little bit slower (in which case I'd still advocate it, because for example, it helps vary what muscle groups you use), then I want to only do it when I start early enough, etc. so as not to give cycling a bad name.
But there's plenty of room for improvement: Right off the bat, notice that I wasted time noting the times. That'll add a minute every time.
Then some minutes could no doubt be shaved off by reducing the size of bikeload #2 by 3 papers and bikeload #4 by 2 papers, and adding those 5 papers to bikeload #5. That'd make bikeload #5 a big load, but it'd knock a few hundred feet off the one substantial requiring-of-extra-bike-rides-along-it-just-to-get-another-load stretch (namely Sleepy Hollow and the part of Sunset between Sleepy Hollow and Hilltop).
Simply parking near Hilltop instead of at the far end of Sleepy Hollow, to do Hilltop, would be another way to eliminate the above backtracking problem, and parking near Hilltop is what I did for most of the last year or however long ago it was that I started usually doing Hilltop by foot. However, with cycling, not just Hilltop but this _whole_ general part of the route can be done without motoring, and therefore, "ideal-parking-spot factor #2" above (i.e. not wasting unnecessary motor travel to get to the parking spot; the nearest "necessary" motoring is along Woodland Way because that moves the load towards the next part of the route, namely Grandview, via Oakmont) comes into play.
My pipe dream that I boasted about earlier of building an instant-launch device (instant launching of the bike from the pickup truck, that is) seems to be continuing to take me a while to get around to doing. The time consumption of unloading the bike from the pickup truck and then loading it back on after doing each set of bikeloads, is considerable, but for now, it's less unacceptable than I thought it would be. It seems to get ameliorated by the fact that I've limited the number of bike-launch sites so as to, in the case of two of the three parking spots, do more than one bikeload per parking spot.
But stay tuned, because I have it mapped out how to do more like 130 of the houses in 8 bikeloads, whenever I get all these time-consumption kinks worked out.
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