Property News · April 15, 2017

White van nation: meet the drivers behind the on-demand economy


Online shopping and one-hour delivery windows means there are more vans on the road than ever before. What’s life like behind the wheel?The car park that surrounds New Spitalfields Market like an awesome concrete moat is, this morning as every morning, teeming with vans. “Thousand, easy,” says Johnny Bates, scanning the fleet of Ford Transits and Mercedes Sprinters as they grind in and out of gear, halt with sudden handbrake croaks, and give out rich and satisfying roars as cargo-bay doors slide open. Bates, 55, who is employed to choreograph traffic at the east London food market, gestures at a Vauxhall Vivaro. “He’s leaking diesel.” Behind him, an inbound Citroën Berlingo beeps and does not slow, and Bates skips out of its path. He narrows his eyes at a departing Renault Trafic, silver-painted and glinting in the 7am sun. Most vans on site accord with tradition (and stereotype): they are white. “But you get the odd few who want to be trendy,” says Bates, who must know the vans and their drivers better than anybody. He jogs away to help a reversing Peugeot Boxer.This car park could be looked at as a microcosm of Britain in 2017, with its finite tarmac, and its great and growing fleet of vans on top. This is the age of the online shop, of the one-click purchase and the convenient delivery window, and to make it all possible, more vans (“Light goods vehicles… with a gross weight up to 3.5 tonnes,” in the DVLA definition) are on UK roads than ever before. Last year, the total topped 4m for the first time. One in every 10 new vehicles registered with the DVLA was a van, and vans now account for a fifth of traffic on urban streets and motorways. At the end of 2015 (the last time such an eccentric calculation was undertaken), the total yearly distance covered by the UK’s vans reached 46.9bn miles, or enough for a few round-trip deliveries to Pluto. Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
Read more…White van nation: meet the drivers behind the on-demand economy

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