Author: C Benton

What a year its been

 

Instead of a lengthy post, photos speak a thousand words so heres a huge collage of our team and some of the more ridiuclous moments of 2018 for us (which will go up in our staff room after christmas)

 

Without all of the fantastic people in our team we have riding, we wouldnt be able to deliver over 75,000 goods across oxford, from parcels to veg boxes to urgent medical goods. They’ve braved all kinds of weather from heat waves to ice rain to make these deliveries happen, all human powered and zero emission! 

 

Some Highlights though:

 

• We’ve rescued a cat called “Spokes” hes also bitten every courier already
• Expanded our depot to twice the size this year
• Expanded our cargo fleet from 7 bikes to 12 including e-bikes and trailers
• Work with over 55 local business’s and clients for same day and multi-drop saving between 15-20 tons of co2
• Delivered over 50,000 parcels the “last mile” for Yodel saving 12 tons of Co2
• Helped a whole range of companies start up and grow from our self storage and warehousing
• Keeping up our 100% solar powered office! 
• Making huge leaps and bounds on our technical side and software to improve our service
• Used GPS trackers to map out our most used routes to hopefully push for improving cycle infrastructure in Oxford
• Campaigned alongside some fantastic organisiations for improvements to cycle infrastructure in Oxford to hopefully make a difference
• Drunk a whole load of coffee and ridden a hell of a lot of miles on cargo bikes as we do every year!

 

We’ll be back in 2019 with some further ambitious plans to expand what we’re doing and we will be looking for more team members, so please do get in touch

 

From all of us, we wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! 

 

 

The need to move deliveries to zero emission methods is all the more pressing. Online orders are ever increasing whilst local regulations come in to tackle issues on air pollution and congestion, such as Oxfords Zero emission zone starting in 2020, and globally the IPCC report citing we have 12 years remaining to reduce our impact. 

 

But this isn’t a doom and gloom post, we think you can feel good about ordering online this year as there’s a good chance your presents will arrive by cargo bike in Oxford!

 

Our current fleet of cargo bikes has reduced co2 emissions by an estimate 12 tons of co2 in 2018 on our last mile deliveries alone, delivering nearly 50,000 parcels!

 

 

We have surprised, inspired and brought joy to unsuspecting customers across the last two years by delivering their online orders and arriving by cargo bike! 

 

This is great, but we’re keen to be more ambitious in 2019. We deliver only about 20% of one national parcel carriers deliveries into Oxford. To deliver the further 80% of mostly larger parcels requires something more.

 

After months of research and development, this week we’re launching cargo trikes to begin testing if these could be a solution for local residents, business’s, schools and offices to receive their online orders while improving air pollution and congestion at the same time. 

 

The best part? Everyone wins. Consumers on the whole want to improve their local neighbourhoods and communities, yet don’t want to give up the convenience of online ordering, so what if you could do both? When you look at fashion retail, for example, you can now order from Next by 9pm and it arrives the next day. This is possible to arrive easily by cargo bike faster and more reliably due to not getting stuck in congestion without pumping out harmful diesel fumes from vans. 

 

On the topic of improving communities, even though you order online, you’re still helping Oxfords local economy. As cargo bikes have a limited range of about 15-50 miles we require a local depot to operate from, so a portion of your online delivery fee comes directly back to us and back into the local community.

 

  

 

In order to meet consumers’ growing demands for online delivery, we need radical thinking in dense urban environments like Oxford city centre in how we meet this need though.

 

A word of warning however: Without improvements to cycle infrastructure in Oxford, it will severely hinder our ability to meet these growing demands. Without the ability to filter past congestion with our wider cargo trikes, this prevents us getting those urgent online orders to you fast, reliably and most importantly in zero emission way

 

 

Gone are the days of five to seven day deliveries, anything you want is at the click of a finger delivered to you wherever you are in minutes or hours, not days and we at Pedal & Post want to meet the challenge of making this even faster yet future proofing deliveries against the growing climate crisis. 

 

One lovely rainy afternoon, Chris and Karis had the opportunity to become famous for 5 minutes as the stars of a section of the BBC’s live daily magazine program The One Show!  They got to race around Oxford on cargo bikes trialling a new piece of navigation software called ‘What Three Words’ which breaks down the whole planet (!) into 3x3m squares, each with its own unique three word identifier.

While very interesting and with a range of useful applications we don’t think it will be replacing the trusty postcode anytime soon.

Much fun was had participating in the magic of television and its not every day you get the chance to avoid making a fool of yourself in front of over 5 million people!

This week, after the success of working with green oil uk and distributing their goods from our depot, we have begun to offer our national and international delivery options to local Oxford business’s alongside our usual local same day and one hour deliveries.

It’s gone very well last week, delivering 30+ subscription coffee boxes with Jericho coffee traders!

Local delivery is between 95p – £1.50 Whilst national is £2.86 (inc vat) for packet services with UKmail (upto 2kg)
International varies depending on the country

Using our services means all local deliveries are 0 emission and help improve congestion but booking national and international deliveries with Pedal & Post means we also collect the first mile by Cargo bike, return to our micro consolidation hub in west oxford and then on forward the parcels to national carriers from our hub on the outskirts of the city, which keeps vans that would normally collect parcels out of the city centre as well!

In future we hope to offer a quote bar on our website, to make booking deliveries/collections as simple and easy as possible for all Oxford city business’s and residents. You’ll never have to queue up in a post office again!

Also our cargo bikes smell like freshly roasted coffee every time we open them up to deliver, little to say our couriers love the new partnership.

So for a bit of fun we ran a poll on twitter asking exactly this question, which would you prefer arrived outside your doorstep to deliver your parcel? although we where a little bias in our question, but as we couldn’t fit all the benefits of using a cargo bike in 140 characters we felt it was impartial… totally.

I don’t think it broke far out of our echo chamber really which consists mainly of cycle friendly people but it was fun to run none the less as 190 people voted on it. I’d be interested why the 6% chose the van though. As far as congestion, air pollution and road safety goes there is no logical reason to choose a van, at least that i can think of…

Poll result van vs bike

We intend to keep doing what we are doing anyway though and thank you to everyone who joined in.

We’ve not done one of these ever! but thought this would be a good way to keep track of and follow the developments of our platform for our clients, customers and even riders. We’ve been working hard behind the scenes working closely with the software team developing the platform.

Many will know we’ve used 2-3 platforms off the shelf in the past which did okay but didn’t cover all the features we needed for the three main areas we cover, so we’ve been building it from scratch with the team from … (well we’ll update the name of the software when it gets released to all to use as a white label service).

Last mile – National carriers drop off parcels to us and we deliver the last mile into the city of Oxford using cargo bikes

Same day / Multi-drop – Delivering something from point A to point B locally including multi-drop routes

First mile – Collections and forwarding them nationally and internationally (coming soon)

The fantastic team behind our platform have released a new update, more details are below:

Website design – This is set to be totally overhauled over the coming months to include a number of exciting new features as we look to offer our services to guest users with pre-payment options including a quote bar on our main website!
*Driver’s Efficiency Report *– This report is a big one for us. This is our way of performance monitoring our couriers for Last Mile & Same Day deliveries. This way we can then set targets, goals and really monitor, measure and improve our services as well as being used to set managerial goals and team goals for the weeks/months ahead. We aren’t big fans of individual competition as we always pitch in together at Pedal & Post and complete all jobs as a team. As we don’t have the option of accepting or declining jobs, we complete them all to a high standard as we employ all our couriers on the living wage, which sets us apart from other courier companies whilst providing a high quality of service.
for blog reports

Ability to generate Credit and Debit Note Voucher – Inevitably although we aim to provide a perfect solution and last year only had 3 enquires we ended up replacing, we now do this via invoice so its clearly displayed.
Saving Quotes and share it via email – Many of you have asked for quotes on delivery jobs, we can now do this with ease and send them to you via email. We can then re-use the already saved quotation for further booking allowing for a more streamlined process.
For blog post2

*List of Fixes*

Merging Last Mile Jobs to already existing routes – This will help with our routing process as we generate greater volumes.
Duplicate pinpoints issue, after withdrawing and assigning the same route
to the same driver
These fixes below are more for the office and riders to improve our office and app views

User login/logout Issue on Idriver
User name visibility issue on Idriver
Load wheel issue fixed while Importing the retail sheet
Address Line 1 and postcode visibility on the google map at office
view
Speed issue while loading bulk jobs in retail section
to our desktop booking app that gives you more access to info around your job and your courier than ever before, so you know exactly what your courier is doing and when

As ever, if you have any feedback do let us know. You can always give us a cal We love hearing from you