Operational

As localnet replaces many existing services and changes the way we live, so people will come to rely on it much more than they did any one of the previous services. If you've stopped hoarding food in your freezer (and thrown the freezer away) because you can get whatever you need delivered within hours, you become much less able to survive for several days without the service. There are particular challenges around:

Quality of Service

Localnet only works thanks to the economies of scale that come by consolidating all collections, deliveries and transport in an area into a single service. Having two competing localnet providers covering the same “patch” immediately negates a huge part of the optimisation. This therefore has to be a local monopoly - which we all know is dangerous. This can only work if each local provider is held to account for the quality of service they deliver - and can be replaced if they fail to perform well.

One way to do this is to have the operation of a localnet separated from the provision and ownership of the infrastructure, with licenses being granted to run the operation for a fixed period - perhaps three or five years. This is the model used in Britain's railways since the break-up of British rail and, although far from perfect, it does allow the worst providers to be weeded out. In the case of localnet, the residents should be able to vote for the company - or perhaps local co-operative - that will run the system.

If some degree of job tenure could be guaranteed, changing the operation from one business to another need not be traumatic for the staff. However, there must be provision for non-performing staff - who may actually be the root cause of poor service - to be weeded out regardless of which organisation they report to.

One advantage that localnet has over the above rail scheme is that most of its employees will also be very directly affected by the quality of service they themselves deliver. LocalHubs should be designed so that the number of people employed at them is the equivalent of a small company - certainly no more than 150 and typically 30-50. By running the LocalHub as a small business, team-spirit is encouraged and there is nowhere for dead wood to hide.

The delivery staff, in particular, should be assigned to the route that includes their own property wherever possible. This ensures that familial pressure is brought to bear too. Morning delivery rounds should include breakfast for the staff - which is the same food as they are delivering to their customers - hence they'll put pressure on their colleagues if it falls below par. The time they get to eat it is the contingency 20 minutes at the far end of their morning delivery round - so they're encouraged to deliver promptly or face rushing their own breakfast - which is what their customers will be having to do too.

Reliability

Each LocalHub needs to be of a sufficient size that having one member of staff call in sick or just fail to turn up does not mean a scheduled morning or evening round is cancelled. Similarly, a single van failing to start should not cause a noticeable impact on the customers. Nor should any one component (including a power supply, a loading/unloading bay etc.) be able to stop the LocalHub from being able to get all scheduled deliveries out on time.

Contingency planning can be quite sophisticated and slack should be built into the system to allow alternative configurations and on-the-fly changes to routes and loadings so that the less time critical elements are sacrificed rather than the important, scheduled runs that people need to be on time to catch buses and trains to get to or from work or school.

As neighbouring localnets will all be using the same equipment and procedures, and are only a few miles apart, they should be able to call on each other for assistance on the rarer occasions when more things go wrong than each hub is able to handle itself.

Predictability

As users place orders and requests on the system in real-time and as vans get delayed by road-works and so on, the computer systems must be continuously optimising the instructions they give out to the loading and sorting equipment and staff. The system has to be very responsive yet also needs to be predictable. Any time that commitments cannot be met, users should be informed via their smartphones and their DeliveryPoint terminals so that they can respond to any delays.

All journeys and goods deliveries will be assigned priorities to allow the system to optimise its response to any unforeseen circumstance. There's no point, for example, delivering a box of ice-cream the following day unless it is returned to a freezer storage unit in the meantime - so maybe it should be delivered rather than the economy on-line shopping delivery that would otherwise take that slot on the van.

Hygiene

The system will be most economically viable and most convenient if it can handle deliveries (including food), plus collection of recyclables, compostable waste and landfill waste. However, most people will baulk at the thought of combining the relatively hygienic Ocado (grocery) van with the monstrous dirty smelly refuse truck that visits weekly.

As long as recyclables are collected daily or every other day, these don't seem too much of a problem. Having the box in a kitchen cupboard encourages us to rinse items before putting them in the box.

Rather than having a huge wheelie-bin outside where only the local cats and dogs can smell it, the refuse bin in a localnet is more akin to the pull-out bin many of us have hidden in a kitchen cupboard. There is therefore an incentive for the user to keep it clean on the outside. A sealable lid ensures that anything put in it is not going to escape while collections every one or two days ensure that nothing in it has time to fester - nor is it allowed to overflow. Staff will not collect boxes that are at all dirty on the outside or will not properly close.

Delivery rounds should be scheduled so that waste collection is only done on the return leg of a journey and hence does not require staff to be handling boxes that contain food once they have started collecting WasteBoxes. They should do the latter wearing gloves.

It remains to be seen whether refuse collection can be sanitised enough that the same staff, compartments and/or vehicles can be used as are later used for delivering other goods. Automated steam cleaning of compartments and boxes at the LocalHub may be adequate given the incentives on customers to keep their own WasteBox clean and sealed.

Adverse Weather

Anything more than a light dusting of snow is well known to bring Britain to its knees. In actual fact, the impact on services varies tremendously. Our own newspaper delivery man seems to delight in the challenge that our lane poses in the snow. The milkman also makes valiant attempts to get through - but the post rarely gets through. When all these - and more - services are combined, it is much more important that the localnet van gets through.

Although electric vehicles don't spring to mind as being better than the diesel vans they replace in snow, they could actually do quite well. Some ingenuity could be applied here:

More inventive solutions could actually exploit this ready availability of significant amounts of electrical power. A localnet van with extra BatteryBox could use small downward-facing hot air blowers in front of each wheel to melt the ice or snow under the wheel. A “buddy-breathing” lead that lets one vehicle connect to the power source of another would allow even stranded vehicles to get moving again when their colleague reaches them.

Each LocalHub could also hold one or more OmniPods designed to hold and spread grit. This allows the localnet drivers to grit their own delivery routes - or at least the most treacherous sections of them - ahead of forecast ice and snow - even on roads that are not accessible to the larger gritting lorries.

Challenges