Royal Mail to replace thousands of bicycles with vans
The sight of a postman pedalling down the street will become much rarer under plans by the Royal Mail to phase out thousands of bicycles and replace them with vans.
The sight of a postman pedalling down the street will become much rarer under plans by the Royal Mail to phase out thousands of bicycles and replace them with vans.
The distinctive red bicycles will be removed from service and shipped by charities to Africa. The Royal Mail believes that rounds will be completed more quickly by using vans carrying up to three postal workers.
Environmental groups have criticised the plans, querying why the Royal Mail would replace a sustainable form of transport with one that causes congestion and is dependent on fossil fuels. Bicycles have been used to deliver post since 1880 and the Royal Mail has more than 16,000, made by the British company Pashley.
Staff fear potential redundancies and the closure of some delivery offices. Those using the vans will work together to deliver post across a neighbourhood before driving on to the next location. Many homes will no longer have a single, dedicated postal worker.
Workers on bicycles often have to return to delivery offices to pick up more mail because there is a limit to what they can carry. Staff using vans would carry mail for several rounds.
The Royal Mail has chosen several cities to test the plan, including Cambridge, Plymouth, Durham and Lincoln. Staff at the Lincoln delivery office walked out in unofficial strike action in March in protest at the proposed introduction of 72 shared vans.
In Cambridge, where cyclists outnumber drivers in the centre, dozens of Royal Mail bicycles are due to be replaced. Margaret Wright, a Green councillor on Cambridge City Council, said: “The bicycle is ideally suited to the job of delivering mail. You can park them anywhere and they don’t cause any congestion. Even during this winter’s severe snow, the post continued to be delivered by bike.
“People like to see their familiar postman cycling along. It is madness to remove bikes and replace them with polluting vans.”
While most of the vans will be powered by diesel, the Royal Mail is experimenting with electric vans that emit no air pollutants. Postal workers in East Oxford are using an egg-shaped electric minivan with a range of about 30 miles.
Bicycles are used on a quarter of the country’s 65,000 delivery routes.
A Royal Mail spokesman said: “We continue to look at ways we can deliver the mail as efficiently as possible to our customers.” Asked how many bicycles were likely to be removed, the spokesman said: “Nothing has been decided.”
Bob Gibson, national official of the Communication Workers Union, said: “Royal Mail plans to bring in thousands of vans right across the country, replacing the majority of cycle and foot routes in towns and cities. This will be a disaster unless the company takes a structured approach to rolling this out.
“We support in principle the introduction of vans on delivery because it gets weight off the shoulders of postal workers and would remove thousands of private cars from delivery routes. However, vans are not suitable for every route or for every town, with Cambridge being a good example.”
The Royal Mail has donated more than 12,000 bikes to the charity Re-Cycle since 1997. Re-Cycle ships the bikes to Ghana, Liberia, Namibia and South Africa.
