The city’s Blue Highways distribution program aims to decrease truck emissions and road congestion while delivering your Sephora package, Henry Alford writes. Its solution? Boats.
The other day, an observer decided to follow one of these parcels, chosen at random—a featherweight, toaster-size box from Sephora, addressed to 235 West Forty-eighth Street—and chart its journey. At 2 A.
M., the package was on a truck from Sephora’s distribution center in Aberdeen, Maryland. At about 3 A.M., it arrived on the Red Hook waterfront at a vast terminal owned by a company called Dutch X, a next-day-delivery service committed to lowering carbon-dioxide emissions. By 10 A.M., the package, along with some two hundred others, had been placed in one of nine Kevlar totes and nestled onto four steel-cage dollies. A Dutch X employee wheeled these onto a small blue-and-white passenger ferry at the Red Hook Ferry Terminal. During a twenty-three-minute ride to Pier 79, on Manhattan’s West Side, one rider looked out at the landmass going by and asked his seatmate, “What if all of Staten Island were turned into an Amazon fulfillment center?” At 10:44 A.M., after docking near West Thirty-ninth Street, a thousand and fifty-six feet above trucks stuck in traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel, the package was assigned to a Dutch X biker named C Jay Jaime, a Brooklyn-born, thirty-four-year-old father of three, who would be riding around town on a special pedal-assist e-bike that came equipped with a windshield, a roof, and an attached trailer. Jaime, who had on a yellow reflective vest and a helmet, held up his phone near his supervisor’s and, courtesy of the FarEye app, instantly received the coördinates for the packages—a total of forty-five—he’d be delivering. “This should take about six hours,” he said. The Sephora box would be his nineteenth of the day. He removed the parcel from its Kevlar tote and placed it on a shelf in the trailer. The D.O.T. estimates that two cargo bikes can do the work of a van or a box truck. Moreover, the trim little contraption cut a wholesome figure reminiscent of a Richard Scarry book—as if a courtesy tram birthed a tiny Zamboni. During the next ninety minutes, Jaime zigzagged around the theatre district dropping off packages. He passed scores of food-delivery bikes, some of the forty-four thousand trucks that traverse the city each day, a mail carrier on foot, and a toddler dragging her Labubu along a sidewalk by its ears. When he saw three trucks idling on Sixth Avenue at Thirty-ninth Street, he said, “This is what we’re trying to eliminate.” Some of the drop-off locations were strikingly similar—luxury apartment buildings whose vast lobbies were tributes to beige and camel, each housing a blocky reception desk manned by a burly fellow with a fastidious beard. At one of the two non-elevator buildings on Jaime’s itinerary, he had to walk up four flights of stairs, whereupon he left a package on a “Hello, Sunshine” doormat. He dropped off another Sephora box at a DoubleTree hotel on Fortieth Street. “Probably a lady from another country who forgot her eyelashes,” he said. At 1:24 P.M., Jaime parked his bike on Eighth Avenue at Forty-ninth Street. Clutching package No. 19, destined for a block away, he said, “Sometimes it takes longer to drive around the corner than to walk there.” He added that occasionally, when he’s delivering a package from Sephora, he will walk right past a Sephora store. “On Riverside Drive, there’s a building with a whole room of packages,” he said. “The doorman told me, ‘People order stuff and then they forget. They don’t even pick it up.’ ” On arriving at 235 West Forty-eighth Street, a tall building called the Ritz Plaza, Jaime’s eyes widened; the reception desk was already covered with boxes from Amazon, stacked three high. “This is every day, every day,” a middle-aged man behind the desk said, in a tone midway between exasperation and resignation. Jaime cleared a space and deposited No. 19. The eagle—a lipstick? a loofah?—had landed. ♦
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