by Walther Ploos van Amstel
In the evenings between 6 and 9 pm, hundreds of meal attendants make residential areas unsafe on their scooters and bicycles. Home meal delivery drivers on scooters drive more dangerous than other scooter riders. Data from Dutch Veilig Verkeer Netherlands (VVN) show that they are even six times more likely to be involved in road accidents.
The food delivery industry is exploding. Various companies compete to deliver food to your doorstep as cheaply and as quickly as possible. With apps like UberEats, Deliveroo and Foodora it’s super easy to order your meal online. But do we actually know how these apps work?
Smartphone data from Deliveroo riders delivering meals for restaurant-to-home shows that bicycles are faster than cars. In towns and cities, bicyclists are also often faster than motorized two-wheelers.
The Guardian reports: “As appetite grows for upmarket takeaways, delivery service is setting restaurants up with satellite kitchens inside metal boxes. Deliveroo in London is setting-up dozens of “dark kitchens” in prefabricated structures for restaurants that want to expand their businesses without opening expensive high street premises”.
The demand for instant deliveries has existed for some time but until recently was seen as a niche service in areas such as urgent document or pizza deliveries. The rise in e-commerce and the changing habits of consumers has resulted in a dramatic change in the demand for instant deliveries and also a major increase in available services …
A new set of competitors, on-demand urban delivery providers, has recently entered the B2C delivery market. These start-ups, including Deliveroo and Foodora in Europe, as well as DoorDash and Postmates in the United States, offer a different form of service: they integrate demand aggregation via their own mobile platforms with dedicated in-house operations to enable …