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.