For Delivery Workers in Latin America, Affordable E-Bikes Are a Superpower

https://reasonstobecheerful.world/e-bike-boom-delivery-workers/

by PaulHoule • 1 year ago

104 119 1 year ago

megamike• 1 year ago

I just returned from Brazil and Argentina and yes these E-Bikes are everywhere

anovikov3• 1 year ago

I wonder why is still anyone NOT using e-bikes for delivery. This is the lowest hanging fruit ever. No charging issues (just a normal wall socket is more than enough), no range issues - trips are short and battery can be swapped by a person in seconds to the one that was charging. Almost zero running costs compared to a two-stroke.

nemomarx• 1 year ago

up front costs compared to non powered bike maybe?

anovikov3• 1 year ago

Compared to non powered bike maybe, but it's only practical in a very limited set of scenarios. I'm comparing to a two stroke moped that's still used by majority of deliverymen down here. These days a two-stroke moped costs about as much as an e-bike and is whole lot more expensive and difficult to maintain.

Only force behind it seems to be the force of tradition. Creepy to see it holding so much control over even very young people who delivery drivers tend to be.

Gerard0• 1 year ago

Not the majority at all, but some people like me do it for fun :)

reaperman2• 1 year ago

Not all cities are like yours - in Houston, it's reasonably common for a business to offer delivery "anywhere within the inner loop", which is just the smallest of three beltways which circumscribe the city.

The inner loop is 100 sq. miles (260 sq. kilometers). Right now (4:30PM on a Monday) drive times and cycling times are comparable (close enough its not really a deciding factor). But bicycling 6-10 miles for each delivery is a good way to get injured. Very few drivers here have any habit of expecting bicycles. When I bicycled to work, I got hit by a car roughly every other week - and that was just one 2 mile ride per day, not multiple 2-10 mile rides per day.

anovikov3• 1 year ago

Again i'm comparing with two-wheel two-stroke mopeds, not with cars... Using cars for delivery is all but impractical anyway because they stand in traffic ESPECIALLY in a city "not like mine", i'd hate to get my food ordered at 6pm, by 7.30, inedibly cold.

euroderf• 1 year ago

I wonder why is still anyone NOT using e-bikes for delivery.

In Helsinki, delivery (of food) seems to be dominated by larger scooters with flat beds between yoke and seat post/rear fender. Maybe because the food delivery boxes are quite large, maybe because they have lots of insulation for winter use ? Maybe because the fat tires on the scooters are more stable on snow & ice ? Just guessing.

Gigachad2• 1 year ago

It pretty much is like that in Australia. Aus post utilises e-bikes and golf cart like things for a lot of deliveries. Most food delivery is done by e bikes.

They still have the traditional vans though since they get loaded up once in the morning to deliver a ton of large packages.

numpad02• 1 year ago

I think it's because Uber Eats et al relies on social leniency for meatspace presence and not paying for parking lots and bikes themselves. E-bikes and EV vans are used successfully by couple large orgs globally albeit at small scales.

Or maybe because EV transition is not low hanging fruits at all, idk.

kh_hk• 1 year ago

When I was doing it, for rush, fun and sport. I guess it's a privileged take on it though.

rererereferred• 1 year ago

Small off-topic, I see those boxed backpacks and think of their shoulders. On motorbike the box rests in the back of the seat but here all the weight is in the shoulders.

People who have done some mountain hiking knows that the weight of the backpack should be mostly in the waist, thanks to the waist belt (sorry if I don't use the right term, I've done most my hiking in Spanish ;) ).

I don't know how weight distribution would differ from walking but with some research perhaps they could carry more while staying more comfortable.

triceratops• 1 year ago

I've done most my hiking in Spanish

That's genuinely impressive, I've done most of my hiking in silence /s

I know what you meant though.

sam_lowry_• 1 year ago

Camino.

IPTN• 1 year ago

Agree with your points about load distribution assuming the weight isn't trivial. Instead of waist, the common term in English would be hips/hipbelt.

Scoundreller• 1 year ago

But now you’re cutting out all that biological shock absorption.

(Aka: why helmet cams are much smoother than any other bike mount)

JKCalhoun6• 1 year ago

Anyone seen the wild carriers on the back of scooters in Tokyo? Apparently for delivering ramen without spilling.

https://blog.btrax.com/en/files/2019/08/Japanese_food_delive...

Fradow• 1 year ago

I can see numerous reasons why you'd want the backpack rather than a box on the bike for food delivery (may not apply for other deliveries):

- no need to fuss when you mount/dismount your bike, your backpack is already on your shoulders. Speed is key.

- the focus is not on carrying capacity, it's on speedy delivery. There's only so much food in their backpack.

- because of the time waiting for orders / going to the restaurant / going back to a hotspot, most of the time the backpack is actually empty.

- a box on the back of a bike costs money.

kibwen3• 1 year ago

Counterpoint: when biking, you generally desire to have your center of mass be lower rather than higher, for better stability and handling.

asl2D3• 1 year ago

Capacity is still needed, or you will miss out on a lot of deliveries in peak hours, where you load up several orders and then deliver them all in one route and you dont really need to carry whole bag to client/restaurant, just fish up the package. Also boxy bags allow for bigger packages(pizza, water bottles) and usually help to pack orders in a way that damages them less.

andrepd2• 1 year ago

Delivery workers should fuck up their backs because otherwise (1) customers would get their shitty fast food and soggy fries 15s or 20s later, and (2) boxes would eat into the profit of the shareholders.

analog31• 1 year ago

Maybe there's an issue with the box getting stolen.

asl2D3• 1 year ago

In my experience hauling deliveries on the shoulders generally sucks, especially if weight is bigger. hence why most active couriers around my parts prefer to fix some sort of baggage rack to their ebikes.

samarthr1• 1 year ago

Over here in Bengaluru, our quick commerce folks seem to prefer Yulu bikes.

They are small, nimble, low powered electric scooters with a decent carrying capacity, whose biggest advantage is _cheap_.

If you ask anyone other than the delivery folks, the yulu drivers are a menace, as they break the already fragile equilibrium that is Bengaluru traffic.

timewizard2• 1 year ago

Food delivery is some of the lowest quality and highest danger work with the least options for matriculating into a better position.

This article is written from a very colonial perspective. I wonder if the authors have pondered that.

knowitnone• 1 year ago

It's a job and it pays the bills. Nobody is calling it a career.

timewizard2• 1 year ago

You read the article, listened to the stories, and looked at the pictures, right? This is obviously the only source of income for many of those people. They're economically trapped and you're just happy to sell them e-bikes and pretend that it materially improved their conditions.

Oh, but it's greenwashing nonsense, so everyone turns off their critical reasoning skills, and pretends it's a secret virtue that they do so. This place has moved so far away from the hacker ethic that it blows my mind. What a pointless set of discussions and a false social pressure to never think beyond the guidelines set out in the article. Oh and you've got a side wide hall monitor to yell at you if you ever do.

Blech.

tim3333• 1 year ago

In London e-bikes have basically take over delivery of small stuff. A decade or so ago they tended to use motor scooters but there are a lot less restrictions on e-bikes.

brokenmachine4• 1 year ago

In Australia too.

They don't follow any road rules and ride on the footpaths at insane speeds.

They're not actually legal - I believe the law is that if they can go over 17kph without pedalling then they must be registered, have indicators, etc. But nobody seems to do anything about it.

I guess some elderly pedestrians must die before something is done.

tim3333• 1 year ago

In the UK the police sometimes confiscate some of the illegal bikes that can to 30 mph+. The legal ones are limited to 15 mph. But yeah it's kind of chaotic.

Gigachad2• 1 year ago

Nothing is being done because it’s not an actual issue. No one is dying from being hit by delivery bikes. They are just annoying.

Meanwhile elderly drivers regularly have incidents that kill entire families and we shrug and say nothing can be done.

sevensor• 1 year ago

An elderly pedestrian I know was recently struck by a car. Compound fractures, dislocated joints. He’s looking at a long recovery and a pile of medical bills, because the driver was barely insured and in the US we’re somehow fine with that. So it comes down to momentum transfer, and I’d much rather he’d have been struck by an e bike.

andrepd2• 1 year ago

That is because there are millions of kms of roads for cars and virtually 0 for bikes.

Plus cars kill thousands of people every day, and we just sort of accept it as a natural fact of life. Why is a bike going 20kph suddenly a problem?

citiguy3• 1 year ago

It's the same here in New York City. I've seen e-bike accidents and they are no picnic. The city does crack down on them from time to time.

floatrock2• 1 year ago

These frustrations are just as real as the resultant medical bills.

But the situation is here because we have a new technology (micromobility) that's struggling to find ways of adapting into the current car-centric infrastructure.

Another possibility is we recognize the benefits of this technology and redesign our infrastructure for it. And yes, it's a long, expensive process that requires changing minds (which is probably the hardest thing to do), so it will happen over years or decades.

So I'm not trying to diminish the problems, I'm just offering an alternative framing: clearly there's something behind this technology, and so we should be asking what does a world that incorporates it properly look like?

marcosdumay• 1 year ago

if they can go over 17kph without pedalling

And there's the excessive reactionary regulation that makes people not comply with the rules.

If you put some reasonable speed limit and look at the other important factors like weight, you won't need to register anything that runs as fast as a child on skates, and can focus on what is really the problem.

Yeul• 1 year ago

E bikes can be used by 15-16 year olds so Dominos uses them a lot here in the Netherlands.

concerned_user• 1 year ago

I don't think it is fair to compare Netherlands to other countries like UK or France because Netherlands has a well established culture around bikes and bike lane infrastructure is one of the best in the world, so it will be the last country that will have any issues because of e-bikes.

rurban2• 1 year ago

For USD 1400 you also get a good E-scooter from Taiwan. I got mine here in Germany for that price. It's far better than an E-bike.

JKCalhoun6• 1 year ago

I think the scooter is going to be the winner in the U.S. People not used to biking are averse to being unable to sit and have both feet solidly on the ground at a stop.

And it will also be a "cargo" scooter because carrying things.

rurban2• 1 year ago

Just that the e-scooter batteries last much shorter than the e-bike batteries. And they won't work in colder temperatures.

Typically 2 years only. E-bike batteries last much longer.

yellow_lead• 1 year ago

It's far better than an E-bike.

Why? Not doubting you, but would love to hear more.

kibwen3• 1 year ago

For this use case you really care about reducing the lifetime total cost of ownership, which means making the bike as reliable, serviceable, and repairable as possible. I love e-bikes, but IME they have a long way to go to get to same level as normal bikes in this regard. It's good that the bikes in the article are locally-built, but I'd like to know whether or not they emphasize using standardized parts with high availability.

luma• 1 year ago

Do you deliver packages in a tropical climate? If the answer is no, maybe you have a different use case than the people in the article. Being able to make it through the day might carry more significance for these users than being able to tear the thing down without any electrical knowledge.

HN in a nutshell - you see an article full of first-hand reports of the users and their use case and your immediate reaction is that you know better about what they want and need than they do.

kibwen3• 1 year ago

I ride an e-bike 30 miles a day. It's my main mode of transportation, as I don't own a car. Right now it's in the shop for repairs; I understand well the time cost and wallet cost of regular maintenance and am actively considering building my own bike to find a better solution. Please don't pretend that you know me.

numpad02• 1 year ago

Hot and humid is the worst for any machines. Which tropical climate is. It's also lowkey why Toyota ended up being ~the most reliable brand of cars.

itishappy• 1 year ago

I think you're entirely misunderstanding the comment you're replying to here. Of course having a usable bike is critical, but the comment was about reparability and cost of ownership in the long term. A repair shop won't be able to help you fix a bike if there's no parts available. This has nothing to do with the users electrical knowledge.

JKCalhoun6• 1 year ago

In my mind there's a "standardized", probably cargo, e-bike that has not yet been invented. A e-bike (or scooter) that is mass-produced and inexpensive like the Volkswagen Bug and popular enough to breed an ecosystem of aftermarket parts, mods, etc.

Let the clones follow using the same parts, connectors and you could have a world-wide phenomena.

davidzweig• 1 year ago

I bought a sit-on electric Chinese cargo scooter from an importer in Bulgaria because I liked how it looked, and it's handy for going around town. They are everywhere in China. They are assembled by hundreds (probably thousands) of small factories. A big center is Wuxi. I visited a few factories there last year. The scooters cost about $350 USD in China.

There seems to be a sort of loose standardization around components, that are also churned out by countless factories. Wheels/motors are generally 10" or 12" size. Brake disks have either a certain 3 or 4 bolt pattern. I'm sure the electrics likewise follow some patterns.

I had the thought that it would be fun to 3d scan parts, measure and document some of these scooters, and make a database of suppliers. Then, who knows, start to make the frames and assemble in Bulgaria.

But you really need to be spending time in China to do that, and it wasn't really the right time for me then.

Another thing to note: branded scooters (niu etc.) are becoming more popular, better quality, extensive plastics, and you can probably order parts from the manufacturer.

conductr2• 1 year ago

They article quotes $1400 for these bikes as initial investment. Add that to my personal assertation that anyone working on a bike should be handy enough to DIY for all things related to service/repair. Bikes are not hard to work on at all. If you agree with that, then you should be able to convert a standard bike to an e-bike with a couple hundred dollar kit that is readily available. Unless there's some kind of market capture here where they can't access the cheap parts I have access too via Alibaba/Amazon, this could easily be a DIY with a few simple tools and some research on YT. I've done this myself with no special electronic experience (however, I did service my own BMX bikes when I was a kid/teen).

bobthepanda• 1 year ago

The only issue with the cheap kits is that they seem to be much likelier to catch fire.

rob742• 1 year ago

So, a 50 year old former "business manager in a government role" is now working as a delivery worker in Colombia, and the fact that the company gave him a loan for an e-bike (they didn't even provide it to him!) is listed as a "reason to be cheerful"?! I swear this is the most depressing thing I read this week so far, and that's something if you consider how depressing the news has been recently...

dfxm12• 1 year ago

This sounds like one of those stories in the US about a community crowdsourcing a ton of money for a little girl to get some life saving surgery that would be covered by socialized health care in almost any other country in the planet.

These stories are cheerful for capital.

avgDev• 1 year ago

To be fair, stories like this occur in countries with socialized healthcare. People often do come to the US for niche specialized healthcare that is cutting edge.

US healthcare is great for the wealthy and those who can afford it. It isn't great for everyone and in general ranks average or poor in some cases.

1-more2• 1 year ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/OrphanCrushingMachine via https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/orphan-crushing-machine

mateus1• 1 year ago

This is PR slop for a startup. Their workers have no benefits or stability.

mock-possum2• 1 year ago

Welcome to the Orphan Crushing Machine - https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/orphan-crushing-machine

sepositus• 1 year ago

From my reading, the article is about how e-bikes are proving to be economically viable and how that benefits the environment. Even more positive is that they are becoming available locally in a way that is accessible to a delivery driver on a fixed low income. Those things seem like something to be pretty optimistic about.

DanielHB5• 1 year ago

I never owned a car, I commute to work in an e-bike and most other places I go to. It is usually faster than car (if you account parking) or public transport.

Since I got an e-bike I haven't bought a single month public-transport cards, I maybe take the metro/bus 4-10 times per month (depends a lot on the weather). The bike paid itself several times over since I got it around 2019.

Me and my partner manage to save a lot of money per month, even though we just bought a new, very expensive (because it is close to downtown) apartment with a huge mortgage by just living close to place we go to, not having a car and using the e-bike.

onlyrealcuzzo• 1 year ago

Your glass is half empty.

Whatever it is is better than the same thing with loud gas motorbikes being everywhere.

rob742• 1 year ago

Ok, fair enough, then maybe they shouldn't have picked this 50 year old guy who used to have a management job but was then forced to flee his country and work as a delivery worker, but a 22 year old who used to sell drugs but now makes an honest living (maybe they couldn't find one?).

But yeah, that aside, I can definitely sympathize with reducing the number of loud stinking gas motorbikes and scooters. Maybe also give loans to users of gas chainsaws, leaf blowers etc. etc. to replace those too...

thrownaway2323• 1 year ago

So, a 50 year old former "business manager in a government role" is now working as a delivery worker in Colombia, and the fact that the company gave him a loan for an e-bike

Millions of venezuelan migrants are in a similar situation. It is not uncommon to see former university professors with PHDs, lawyers, engineers with decades of experience, etc. to find themselves in another country working as Uber drivers and other types of jobs. Having to migrate really fucking sucks especially if you are old. Consider yourself lucky if you live in a country that is politically and economically stable and you have some sort of net to support you when things don't work out for you.

sebastiansm• 1 year ago

It would be interesting to know how many of those old professors with PHDs, lawyers, engineers supported Hugo Chavez at the beginning.

miunau• 1 year ago

This goes for European countries as well. Even well-educated people, from whatever country locals deem undesirable at that moment, in general do not get the chance to work in jobs that suit their education. Sometimes these people have benefited from taxpayer funded education in that host country, but the prevalent racist attitudes exclude them from even getting job interviews. E.g. Finland is losing lots of immigrants they have spent lots of money educating to this- not helped by the policies of the current government- people they need to stay in order to plug the plummeting birth rate are forced to leave the country because there is nothing there for them besides rejection after rejection, or jobs that do not match their education.

alienthrowaway2• 1 year ago

"There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in." - Desmond Tutu

Society is not ready for the conversation because more often that not, inquisitive people who dare go upstream find out that capitalism - directly or indirectly - is pushing into the river, and have to walk back down to while hanging their head, and continue pulling those they can out of the river.

umeshunni• 1 year ago

Yes I'm sure it's the capitalism in Venezuela that pushed these people into taking these jobs in Columbia.

josefresco• 1 year ago

Recently spent about 2 weeks driving to Boston every day and 100% of the delivery vehicles I noticed were gas powered scooters. Maybe the electric bike delivery people don't ride on the road?

yesfitz• 1 year ago

Boston where? This article is about Latin America.

If you're interested in e-bike delivery in Boston, Massachusetts though, there was a pilot program starting in August of 2024: https://www.boston.gov/departments/transportation/boston-del...

Dwedit• 1 year ago

"E-bikes produce virtually no greenhouse emissions after manufacturing"

Except for the electricity to charge it, which could either come from clean or dirty power. True about the lack of exhaust though.

Then it leads to the question about the efficiency of generation, distribution, and battery charging vs the distribution and burning of gasoline. Also the weight of the bike. Perhaps someone else has already done the math on this.

goosedragons• 1 year ago

You have to have a really really dirty energy supply for an electric vehicle to be a higher emitter than an ICE vehicle. E-bikes also will replace things like two-stroke mopeds which are especially dirty for ICE vehicles.

codedokode• 1 year ago

I am surprised that people here are saying good words about food delivery workers. They are at least annoying when they break all the traffic rules, crossing roads in every direction on every traffic light color, and often dangerous when they ride on the sidewalk with a high speed. I wish they were at least banned from the sidewalks.

Also recent police raid (they should make them every day) showed that some of the delivery workers were illegal migrants, which shows that companies do little effort to check their documents when hiring.

For Delivery Workers in Latin America, Affordable E-Bikes Are a Superpower

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