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Originally Posted by GGG
Why do you blame these things. In general they take people off the roads and replace with drivers who drive all the time. In general that should be an improvement.
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Not a chance they reduce the overall volume on the road.
In the case of skip there would be a driver on way or another if you wanted to get a bite to eat but it also has the added traffic due to people previously not having so many options of getting food delivered at home which is going to add traffic when they order delivery instead of making something themselves at home.
Uber makes it less likely that people will take transit or opt to have drinks at home rather than go out because they don’t have to worry about the hit or miss availability of cabs, especially in the more suburban areas.
Both Uber and skip are jobs that basically anyone with a license and clean abstract can at least try with very little barriers. While some of the more experienced drivers for both aren’t much of an issue safety wise the lack of vetting certainly doesn’t guarantee that all drivers have enough experience to be considered as safe just because they’re “driving all the time”. Skip and Uber drivers would be on the honour system in most cases when it comes to reporting accidents so even if the company would(and I think they do) remove or discipline drivers who get into accidents while on the clock it’s damn near impossible for those companies to enforce that policy consistently.
Amazon is probably the most obvious culprit in adding traffic and dangerous conditions to the roadways. People are still making designated trips to stores or stopping at stores on their commutes home(ie not driving additional KMs), but when they do they generally don’t want to make multiple trips. There are literally people who order a couple of items a day over multiple days(meaning multiple trucks and deliveries over multiple days) from Amazon when they would otherwise be able to get all of those items at 1 store or mall in 1 trip in 1 day in many cases without even needing to make a designated trip.
Amazon’s distribution network and general business model adds a lot of additional strain because of things like the sheer volume of employees they have coming and going at their fulfillment centres during shift changes(like 500+ at a time) and their Amazon flex drivers who use their own personal vehicles that are jam packed with parcels often in a manner that is more likely to cause collisions and in turn make traffic worse. If you’ve ever seen a small civic with the front and rear passenger seats stacked to the roof with unsecured Amazon parcels chances are that’s an Amazon flex driver. (Or potentially a very successful porch pirate if they’re not wearing a safety vest)