Bikes vs Golf Trolleys: an answer to my critics.

[Roy Mayall]

I recently wrote a piece about the revision in which I made the case, once again, for the retention of cycles.

http://roymayall.hubpages.com/hub/Modernisation

I know I’m banging my head against a brick wall with this one, and that neither the Royal Mail, nor the union are going to listen to me. Nevertheless, I still have the right to have my own point of view and to state it publicly.

I put the link onto Royal Mail Chat and got a number of responses, which I would like to answer here.

drb said:

I cannot see the issue of "weight off shoulder" on this article.

Roy: Weight off shoulder applies to walking deliveries. It doesn’t apply to bikes. There is no weight on shoulder on a bicycle round. The bike carries the weight.

ClashCityRocker said:

Talk about banging the same drum.....

How many packets can you fit on a bike?
Not many ....so you are reliant on a packet duty in a polluting van to complement your cycle duty. Not to mention the polluting van delivering your drop bags.

And there are great swathes of the country where bikes are simply not practicable.
And some people just don't want to ride them.

Or are the lycra clad bicycle nazis going to enforce their use for our own good?

Roy: I like your name. I was a great fan of Joe Strummer too, though I suspect he would have been on my side on this one rather than yours.

It’s true you can’t fit all that many packets on a bike and that cycle duties are reliant on a packet van and bag drops. These are usually the same, not separate vans. In our office there are fifty cycle duties and two packet vans. You say that the packet vans are polluting. The solution? Replace the two packet vans, not the fifty bikes. And if there are great swathes of the country where bikes are not practicable, there are also great swathes of the country where they are the most practicable. The point about postal delivery as an industry is that it has to take the terrain into account. In some areas bikes are best, in some they are not. Who decided on this one-size fits all solution to the Royal Mail’s delivery problems, where we are all going to be made to walk, where the job will be made harder, slower and less efficient? It just doesn’t make sense.

I like your last line. It’s a good joke, but you and I know it is not true. It’s not lycra clad bicycle Nazis that are the problem: it’s office-bound computer Nazis who are making the running on this, most of whom have never delivered a letter in their lives.

Fishtank wrote:

I realise this is a major issue for the minority, but for the vast majority of delivery staff it isn't an issue at all, they didn't have bikes and were forced to carry the mail around on their backs.
I think the real issue is the non use of trolleys in offices that have had delivery methods revisions and i think unfortunately articles like this make getting members to accept the use of trolleys even more difficult from a rep's point of view.
It's long past time to move on.

Roy: Using a bike was the one thing I was genuinely proud of as a postal worker. Bikes are simply the most energy efficient machines on the planet, bar none. So we are replacing a whole fleet of non-polluting, energy efficient machines with vans, in an era of oil wars and rising oil prices, as global warming is starting to hit and our ice-caps are melting. It may not be an issue to you, but it will be an issue to your children and to your children’s children, and to all the generations to come. I think you had better ask them if it is time to move on or not.

Straigh4ward wrote:

When we consider the change in the type of items that we now carry, the ever increasing quantities of packets, the days of the bike as a suitable method of delivery have pretty much drawn to a close. There will always be certain individual sets of circumstances whereby the bike will still remain the best method in a very tiny number of cases but these will be so far and few between as to be negligible.

Roy: I suspect the number of cases in which the bike will remain the best method is far more than you are estimating. Currently 25% of offices use bikes. My guess is that in those offices bikes will always remain the best. It’s certainly true in my office. And if other delivery methods are required in some cases, why not electric bikes, or mopeds, or small motorbikes, or even electric cars? Why vans? There were always hundreds of other options available. Why choose the very worst one?

drb wrote:

In terms of ill health retirement, not only does the member, due to back/shoulder/knee injuries make himself/herself unable to perform an outdoor duty they cannot work at all. The amount of disability claim forms sent out are increasing. The ages are getting younger too. It was on average 40-45. This has changed to 25 -40. It is not a union soundbite. The trolley does slow you down. The trolley does use muscles you do not normally use when you carry bags. However it does take the weight off your knees back and shoulder. To add, the amount of rehabs per office are increasing, with no help from ATOS.

Fishtank wrote:

The LWT's purpose was to enable longer delivery spans and protect full-time jobs.
With 75% of deliveries done carrying a bag do you think 4hr+ deliveries would have been sustainable without them?
I think those who used a bike and never had the pleasure of carrying mail around for 3.30hrs should give it a go....it's a laugh.

Roy: All of this is about weight on shoulder again. Fair enough. Maybe we needed a new delivery method where the method was carrying a bag over your shoulder, which is true in 75% of the cases according to your figures. But what about those other 25% where we used bikes? It’s that one-size-fits-all mentality again. Why replace something that works with something that doesn’t in order to satisfy some fascist urge for uniformity? Hasn’t anyone ever heard of adaptability here, of “horses for courses”? The Royal Mail had all that money to spend, so what did it do? Did it use its imagination? Did it come up with an ingenious solution to a complex problem? Did it adapt to the changing terrain? No. It bought a fleet of vans. We could have had new, lighter bikes with more capacity (the Pashley is heavy and badly designed). We could have had power assisted electric bikes with lightweight trailers. All sorts of possibilities which would have helped speed us up and taken the weight off our shoulder, rather than slowing us down and adding stress to our already overworked days.

You know what I think will happen? People will stop using the golf-trolleys and start hefting the bags about anyway, which will mean you will have more stress injuries of the kind you describe, as now the ex-bike users will have them too. Such is your solution.

You couldn't have come up with a worse solution if you'd tried.

[Straight4ward]

Roy, you’re flogging a dead horse, or bicycle in this case, and as much as I share your enthusiasm for the bike I’ve had to come to terms with the fact that it isn’t suitable for our workload these days.

Other delivery methods are required in pretty much all cases, not “some” as you state. The reason the van was chosen over electric bikes, cars, scooters, motorbikes is quite simply because of its greater capacity. None of the other methods you suggest can carry as much as the van. The van isn’t the worst option it is the one that is most suited to our requirements.

I couldn’t possibly fit all my packets and parcels into anything smaller than the van and the love affair that the British public has with online shopping shows no signs of declining, quite the opposite in fact.

Like so many of my colleagues I’ve had to adjust, it’s time to move on Roy.
Best wishes to you for the future.

[Lincox]

Straightfwd, your answer is ill conceived. Providing a van for each set of two delivery personell is not efficient, does not take weight off the shoulder, creates a negative response to green issues and certainly will not provide the profits that RM crave for. If you took ALL attended calls away from the footsoldiers (ie packets that cannot be posted, Recorded, Specials) then a cycle would remain the most efficient method to deliver mail. It would be delivered quicker, with less stress, and no increase to greenhouse gases. All attended calls would then be carried out by fewer vans, as they would not need to load mail bags onto them together with trolleys. Yes, there may be a need for a two tier job/pay structure to reflect responsibilities etc., but we already have pay differentials for the like of long haul drivers etc. I now expect a string of responses shooting this down, but look forward to constructive criticism.

[clashcityrocker]

If you took all attendance calls away from the footsoldiers, they would either all be part time or they would have even longer delivery spans.
Which bit of the argument do you not understand?
Bikes cannot take the either the volume of mail or the volume of packets to be stand alone duties.
They rely on support duties.
The business plan was to remove those duties.
If someone somewhere has a duty on flat terrain that doesn't ever surpass 32 kg of mail (letters/flats/packets combined) and doesn't fill more than 3 bags I agree that the bike would remain the ideal tool for the job.
How many duties are there left like that?

[Straight4ward]

Straightfwd, your answer is ill conceived. Providing a van for each set of two delivery personell is not efficient, does not take weight off the shoulder, creates a negative response to green issues and certainly will not provide the profits that RM crave for. If you took ALL attended calls away from the footsoldiers (ie packets that cannot be posted, Recorded, Specials) then a cycle would remain the most efficient method to deliver mail. It would be delivered quicker, with less stress, and no increase to greenhouse gases. All attended calls would then be carried out by fewer vans, as they would not need to load mail bags onto them together with trolleys. Yes, there may be a need for a two tier job/pay structure to reflect responsibilities etc., but we already have pay differentials for the like of long haul drivers etc. I now expect a string of responses shooting this down, but look forward to constructive criticism.

As one apparently given to ill-conceived responses, here’s another;

Royal Mail is trying to move away from the inefficiency and cost of needing two duties to cover one address.

What you seem to be proposing is some kind of postie’s utopia where anything that slows you down and prevents you from getting an early finish (i.e. packets, recorded, tracked, specials or anything else that involves door knocking) is conveniently dumped on your galley slave of a driver. Unfortunately for you, the things that you’re so keen to get rid of are pretty much the only things where we can anticipate growth in the future.
Of course to fill the void that has now appeared in your daily routine RM could double the size of your current walk or they could just reduce your hours. Ultimately though, you would deemed surplus to requirements.

[Lincox]

Inefficient it maybe, but not as inefficient as a LWT if used in accordance with proper procedures as far as security, and health and safety is concerned. Why does a driver who no longer has to deliver MAIL be deemed to be lumbered with extra work? Your idea of Utopia is protecting jobs which will no longer be there. These jobs will go and there is nothing you or I or the CWU will be able to do about it. My ill conceived idea is to retain a system of working.ie cycles which truly reduces punishment that the body has to endure throughout a long working week, as long as we have a job, and at the same time provide the efficiency that park and loop is not providing and what the company crave for.