On the Clock is Motherboard's reporting on the organized labor movement, gig work, automation, and the future of work.
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These stops often include addresses on both sides of a street—or highway. Rather than directing drivers to make a U-turn and deliver packages on one side of the street and then the other, the app instructs drivers to cross the street on foot. Depending on the size and number of packages, the driver might have to walk across the street multiple times, or run in order to meet Amazon's delivery quotas.“Stop consolidation is a big thing [at Amazon]. Without it, the routes would be too expensive.”
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Alexandra Miller, a spokesperson for Amazon Logistics, denied that Amazon delivery drivers frequently jaywalk across busy intersections and run across high-speed rural highways, and said that if the company identifies data quality issues or defects in its maps, it fixes them promptly.Do you have a tip to share with us about Amazon? Do you have information about accidents involving Amazon delivery drivers? We’d love to hear from you. Please get in touch with the reporter Lauren via email lauren.gurley@vice.com or securely on Signal 201-897-2109.
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Amazon's delivery drivers are technically employed not by Amazon but by third-party contractors, known as delivery service partners, of which there are more than 800 worldwide. Despite this employment arrangement, which removes Amazon's responsibility for accidents and other liabilities on the road, Amazon research scientists design the algorithms that determine the routes of drivers who deliver its packages.“Sometimes you'll get a stop where you'll be delivering six packages on one side of the street and seven on the other side and someone ordered a 50 pound page of dog food or cat litter, and you're struggling."
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Designing delivery routes for last-mile logistics companies like Amazon isn't a straightforward task. Rather than making hundreds of thousands of individual routes each day, research scientists create algorithms. These determine how routes are dispersed geographically to and from different Amazon delivery depots and in what order each driver must deliver packages to complete as many deliveries as possible in a given amount of time. Unlike Uber and Lyft rides, which require algorithms to determine the single fastest route a driver can take between point A and point B, route designers at delivery companies like Amazon and FedEx are required to solve mathematical problems involving a large set of variables involving destinations and distances. Finding the most efficient path that travels through all of them is often called the "vehicle routing problem." Research scientists have yet to develop a best solution for designing vehicle routes with multiple stops, despite decades of research, but delivery companies have developed different methods to create optimal routes. Typically, this means finding the shortest route, but some companies have chosen to focus on cutting delays, such as traffic and wait time making left-hand turns.Motherboard reached out to the top package delivery carriers, UPS and FedEx, and the United States Postal Service to find out whether their routes also force package carriers to run across the street.
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