Community Board 1 Seeks Limits on Open-Air Parcel Transfer Sites
The City’s Department of Transportation is developing a pilot program to establish multiple micro-delivery hubs in Lower Manhattan – open-air logistics centers, where trucks offload cargo to couriers pushing carts or riding bikes. Community Board 1 is supportive of the plan to improve efficiency of package delivery and reduce truck traffic, but has concerns about the proposed locations.
The DOT cites a range of metrics: More than 80 percent of New York City residents received a package at home in the last seven days, while 18 percent received packages on four or more days. The agency notes that before the Covid pandemic, deliveries were split between commercial and residential customers at a ratio of 60 to 40 percent, but that balances has now shifted to roughly 80 percent of all deliveries going to directly to residential customers.
In order to make it possible for fewer trucks to spend less time on city streets, the DOT wants to create neighborhood micro-delivery hubs – spaces located within public or private rights-of-way, where parcels are transferred from large trucks to smaller, low-emission and electric vehicles, or human-powered conveyances, such as cargo bicycles and hand carts.
The DOT is considering four locations in Lower Manhattan. Two are in Battery Park City: on North End Avenue between Chambers and Murray Streets, and on South End Avenue near the intersection with West Thames Street. Another is in Tribeca, at Sixth Avenue and Franklin Street. And the fourth is in the Seaport neighborhood, at the intersection of Fulton and Cliff Streets.
At its June 24 meeting, CB1 voiced concerns about each these. The North End Avenue site is near the entrance to an assisted living facility for seniors, as well as multiple bus stops, while the South End Avenue location is located near bus stops and a house of worship, and overlaps with work sites for the North/West Battery Park City Resiliency project, which will begin construction next year.
CB1 called upon DOT to move the planned micro-hub at Sixth Avenue and Franklin Street north so that it would not interfere with plans to extend Barnett Newman Triangle south to Franklin Street. The Board further asked that the agency move the location of the micro-hub slated for Fulton and Cliff Streets east to avoid blocking a driveway.
In a resolution that supported establishing these parcel-transfer hubs in Lower Manhattan, CB1 requested hours between 7am and 10pm Monday through Saturday, and asked that “all micro-hubs should be designed and evaluated so that their activities do not interfere with pedestrian spaces, or traffic, bus, or bike lanes and that they don’t limit sight lines for pedestrians, cyclists or motor vehicle operators if they are near intersections.”