Please refer to the hypothetical grocery delivery business described in Case 1. You are now confronted with a decision concerning transportation modes.
Obviously, neither trains, ships, pipelines, large trucks nor airplanes are options for deliveries in residential neighborhoods (although drones may be an option in the near future). The options for your business are cars, motorcycles or bicycles.
Cars can either be owned by the business, leased by the business, provided by employees (e.g. the usual pizza delivery scheme), or rented on a per-trip basis from a taxi company or private owners (à la Uber). A mixture of these options is also a possibility.
Motorcycles can be owned by either the riders or by the business. Ditto bicycles. Although the weather in Silicon Valley is generally temperate, a delivery system that relied exclusively upon wind-in-the-face vehicles would have to have some sort of foul weather backup.
In addition to flexibility and cost-effectiveness, whatever system you devise will have to consider the availability of operators and insurance costs, both for your employees and for the people they may run over.
The readings in this Module are mostly concerned with “heavy” systems, up to and including multimodal (ships to trains to trucks), but the basic considerations involved in choosing a system – speed, efficiency, cost-effectiveness, safety, etc. – are applicable to any type of technology.
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