Royal Mail, where is the Electric Bike Project

[Beeping-Sleauty]

was under the impression that Royal Mail were planning to replace all their conventional Pashley bikes with Pedelecs,

then i saw this:

End of the road for Royal Mail bicycles is no longer Africa | ETA

it came to my attention because of the involvement of Re-Cycle, based in Colchester they do sterling work and over the years have sent thousands of bikes to needy causes abroad.

then i saw this:

Royal Mail to replace thousands of bicycles with vans - Times Online

so, does anyone know what happened to the Pedelec Project....? or was this quietly 'shelved'

 

[JohnInStockie]

Wasnt aware of this Beeps, such a shame, 1 step forward, 2 steps back

John

 

[flecc]

In fact we already have this kind of van service in my London area. The vans are crew vans with some space given over to mailbags and they carry a number of posties to their round points, dropping them and additional mail off. The postie then dumps some of the mail into a postbox storage point and completes the first bagful, then comes back for the second bag to deliver to contents. Once done they wait at the roadside for the van coming round again to pick them up.

It's all part of the larger workload that the postal workers have been complaining about, and their new workloads aren't possible with bikes in many cases. These announcements don't surprise me since I'd wondered how they would reconcile these new work patterns with bikes, but it doesn't necessarily mean the end of the e-bike plan. If as rumoured they are going for the German post bike, that has a huge carrying capacity in it's front and rear carriers, so it would still be possible to take out two very large bagfuls of mail.

Certainly the prospects for the adoption of 16,000 e-bikes don't look good now, but much depends on whether the management are able to get the postal workers to permanently accept the new working patterns. It's also still in question whether the new patterns will even work universally and enable the Royal Mail to retain all it's present customer base.
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