Another venue ripe for cost internalization: NYC food delivery

This post was published earlier today by the New York livable-streets site Streetsblog, under the headline Reining in Deliverista Distances is the Key to Safety. I’ve cross-posted it here because the proposal it conveys — a per-mile charge on app-based food deliveries — is an easily understandable illustration of the principle of “cost internalization” embodied by carbon taxing. Other recent illustrations are Strawberry Yields Forever, which reported on a grower-backed tax on groundwater in California’s Pajaro Valley; A Tantalizing New Front in Externality Pricing, about a proposed tax on helicopter noise; and periodic posts on the twists and turns in the long campaign to implement congestion pricing in New York City (here and here).

The text here duplicates the expositon in Streetsblog but near the end adds a paragraph contesting the widespread presumption that externality pricing necessarily injures marginalized groups (environmental justice communities, in the case of carbon pricing; food-delivery riders, in the case of the mileage charge outlined here).

— C.K., Nov 5, 2024. 

Food deliveries in New York are spanning ever-longer distances. Before food apps, and before motorized bikes, deliveries came from nearby — from the local pizza parlor or neighborhood joint. Now deliveristas can be seen traversing the East River bridges or blasting up the Hudson River Greenway and the Central Park drives. When I ask a delivery rider at a red light how far he’s going, it’s often much more than a mile.

I’ll say it out loud: All that DMT — Deliverista Miles Traveled — has become a drag on other city cycling. It’s made the streets more chaotic and is stressing our bicycle lanes. Routine cycling maneuvers like sliding over in the bike lane or turning now require constant signaling and checking to avoid getting clocked from behind.

Cars and trucks remain the greater danger, of course. But I find lumbering vehicles easier to anticipate and navigate around than darting mopeds or e-bikes. No, I’m not giving up cycling, but I’ve lost count of how many acquaintances have. The need for vigilance and the fear of being taken down in a crash became too great.

What the Comptroller Missed

City Comptroller Brad Lander last week issued a report, Strategic Plan for Street Safety in the Era of Micromobility, aimed at safeguarding workers and minimizing dangers to the public from the food-delivery industry.

As Streetsblog reported, Lander wants the city to exert authority over app companies like DoorDash and Uber Eats that process 90 percent or more of food deliveries in the five boroughs. 

His suite of reforms is a start, especially jawboning officials to throttle the import and use of non-UL e-bike batteries like the ones that have sparked scores of serious fires.

But it misfires in pinning its street-safety aspirations on an empowered workforce and a semblance of enforcement by NYPD. The first can only go so far. The second appears to be a pipe dream. Lander also failed to include the lowest-hanging fruit for food-delivery safety: reining in deliverista miles traveled.

Reduce ‘Deliverista Miles Traveled’

Picture 40 percent of citywide food-delivery e-bike and moped miles eliminated. This would greatly enhance everyone’s safety, not just by directly cutting the sheer amount of fast and sometimes startling two-wheeling but also by dialing down street chaos and helping other cycling regain a footing in bike lanes and general traffic.

So how would that be accomplished? Mathematically, by shaving a mile from current deliveries covering a mile or more

According to a 2022 report from the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, nearly two-thirds of the city’s app-based food-deliveries exceed one mile. (And nearly one-quarter of all deliveries extend for two miles or more.) Trimming a mile from those deliveries would reduce average delivery distances to 0.85 miles from the current 1.50 — a 43-percent reduction that I round down to 40 percent.

How can we make this shrinkage come about? By taxing app-based food deliveries for each mile beyond an initial free mile — as I outlined over a year-and-a-half ago in the Streetsblog piece, “Want Safe Batteries? Stop Pretending Food Delivery is Free.” The dollar-per-extra-mile fee would be doubled in Manhattan south of 60th Street, where food choices are abundant and foot traffic and road congestion are heaviest. The charges would be paid to the city by the app companies, who would tack it on the bill — creating an incentive for customers to order from eateries closer to home.

I can’t say conclusively that my dollar charge will bring about the envisioned 40-percent mileage reduction. I can confidently predict traffic reduction from congestion pricing because there is so much data about car trips, but food-delivery mileage charging is uncharted territory. The dollar charge for deliveries over a mile might have to be higher, or perhaps could be lower, but we’ll only know if the city conducts surveys or a simulation with randomly selected families spending down pre-filled accounts.

What I can say with confidence is that the delivery mileage charge would generate a ton of revenue — perhaps not my earlier estimated $100 million a year, but close to it. This pot could pay to swap out unsafe batteries and establish deliverista hubs. Some of these endeavors are already under way, happily, and the Comptroller’s plan would move things along, though on the taxpayer’s dime.

(Don’t) Walk on the Demand Side

The omission of a delivery-mileage charge from Lander’s report is a huge missed opportunity, but it wasn’t surprising. New York City’s leading cycling advocacy group, Transportation Alternatives, has yet to mention the idea in its policy papers. Perhaps in striving for solidarity with deliveristas, TA has short-shrifted the concerns of non-commercial cyclists — as Michele Herman, lead author of TA’s classic Bicycle Blueprint (PDF), argued this year in the Village Sun.

Lander’s omission also mirrors the tendency in environmentalist circles to turn a blind eye to the consumption aspect of so many policy questions. Climate protesters picket at banks that they say enable drilling and pipelines, but not at the gas stations at which motorists dutifully fill Big Oil’s coffers or at showrooms pimping the machines that actually combust the petrol. Similarly, the decade-long project to divest pension funds and universities from fossil fuels didn’t cut carbon extraction and burning one iota. It did, however, divert “YIMBY” activism that is vital to New York and other inherently low-carbon cities. 

Climate may seem gargantuan vis-a-vis food delivery, but the parallels are powerful. Both spheres treat “demand” as inviolate. Just as suburban households are allowed McMansions and fleets of SUVs, we city dwellers are unquestioned on our right to order meals and treats anytime from anywhere.

Externality pricing is sidelined in both spheres as well. Just as carbon taxes would crush demand for coal, oil and gas, a dinner-delivery mileage charge would help rebalance ordering from faraway to nearby, adding a measure of predictability and orderliness — hence, safety — to city streets, far more than policing could ever do. Yet internalizing even a sliver of an activity’s harms into its price is out of bounds in contemporary discourse. Congestion pricing, whose supposedly “too high” $15 toll would have only offset one-sixth of a car trip’s congestion causation cost, got shelved lest drivers flip out.

And let’s not overlook the diktat granting veto power to potentially afflicted outgroups. In carbon pricing, those are primarily environmental justice communities deemed threatened by carbon emissions charging, even though economic mitigations are readily available and EJ communities suffer the greatest damage from extreme heat, flooding and other climate-wrought disasters.

Delivery-mileage pricing would directly affect the city’s 65,000 deliveristas, of course, but perhaps not adversely. Diminishing deliverista miles traveled wouldn’t equally diminish their employment and wages, since total deliveries would be largely unchanged. What would almost certainly fall is the terrible annual toll of a dozen or more fatal on-the-job crashes.

No sector of labor (or business) in New York City should be held sacrosanct. All should be governed for the greater good. Food delivery regulation should advance social safety without infringing on worker power. A mileage fee on food deliveries can serve workers as well as the society of which they’re a part. What are we waiting for?