Consolidated Objectives

The ability to move things – whether goods, energy or ourselves – quickly and efficiently from business to business and ultimately to our homes affects all of us every day. We all know that transport directly burns a substantial proportion of our fossil fuel and overall energy budget. The indirect influence of transport is even greater though. Our decision to travel at all is driven by where things – goods, other people and businesses – are located and how the cost and convenience of that compares with the alternative of having them come to us. Whether we use something again, recycle it or throw it away is often determined by the relative cost and ease of getting this one cleaned, recharged or refurbished versus getting hold of a replacement.

How practical is it to switch a meaningful proportion of our car use across to public transport? The focus of the government's previous plan was very much on how people are transported – with a tacit assumption that the very sophisticated logistics systems of big companies were doing a great job of optimising how goods are transported. The arguments on the freight transport side were relatively simple pricing comparisons of road versus rail for backbone distribution routes. However, I argue that one cannot split the two as the way goods are transported has a huge impact on when and where we choose to travel.

A journey to work or to drop the kids off at school is fundamentally different from a trip to the local post office to put three letters in a post box. We can have a huge impact on the number and nature of journeys by:

Where an individual does need to travel to select items (e.g. to try on new clothes; compare wallpapers etc.) they often take a car in order to get the items home as carrying them to or on public transport is inconvenient or impractical. If we all had time to do a daily as opposed to a weekly shop we wouldn't need to go by car.

There are already huge inefficiencies in the way items are delivered to our homes. The internet shopping revolution is worsening the situation with dozens of competing courier companies each criss-crossing the other throughout the country. Consolidating all the items for delivery in an area shortening journeys and increases the efficiency of the delivery many fold.

The extremities of our public transport systems have been pruned back to the point where there is no longer an effective “feeder” network into the main routes. As soon as someone feels the need to jump in their car in order to reach the bus-stop or station, there is then a great temptation to stay in the car for the whole journey

We must think about moving ourselves around and moving “stuff” around as one single transport issue since the two are so intimately related. Each country differs in how “stuff” gets to and from people. Some have more door-to-door deliveries than others. The British have their milk delivered whereas many countries do not. The frequency and nature of delivery also varies. American post-boxes differ from British letter-boxes and so on.

However, no country has a rationally thought through and “designed” approach to delivery of “stuff” to and from our homes - let alone delivery and collection and certainly not stuff and people. Over the last few hundred years, separate businesses and procedures have evolved in each country and neighbourhood. The vast majority of these have come about to distribute or collect a single class of goods – hence there are many different, unconnected and incompatible distribution networks in place.

Even in those few cases where the distribution network does carry a variety of goods (postal and courier delivery services) we find a ridiculous number of competing services covering the same geographical area. Whilst there are benefits to be gained from competition and the avoidance of monopolies, can it really make sense to have a dozen different firms each deliver one package a day to a given street rather than one firm delivering several at a time? Yes, there must be a way to hold that firm to account for the quality and price of its service but this can be done by the issuing and withdrawal of a license rather than ruining the economies of scale that we must take advantage of if we are to limit fuel wastage and traffic congestion.

There are a lot of very influential vested interests that would like to maintain the status quo but imagine how much more efficient and valuable a general purpose delivery and collection service would be. All of the above can be addressed by an integrated collection and delivery service as described here. An overall goal should therefore be simply:

To do for the delivery of goods to and from our homes what the internet has done for data delivery and the shipping container for long distance transport.

To achieve this, we need a single transport system that can carry people and/or most types of goods within a neighbourhood and can act as a “feeder” to the (already well optimised) mass and bulk longer distance transport services:

Background