Since the launch of Deliveroo in February 2013, on-demand food delivery has experienced stratospheric growth in the UK – according to Lumina Intelligence, the market was worth £11.4 billion in 2020. Now established players such as Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo face new entrants: Estonian on-demand delivery service Bolt raised €600 million in August; two months earlier Istanbul food delivery giant Getir was valued at $7.5 billion after raising $550 million in funding.
Around five million Brits are employed in the gig economy, and while we’ve got used to the convenience they provide, scratching beneath the surface of the smooth operation of “the last mile” shows gaping inefficiencies: streets clogged by idle couriers who spend a higher percentage of their time waiting than being paid to deliver food, and who often find themselves competing for the same jobs. The companies know these issues exist, but simply factor them into their operating model.
This has not escaped the attention of academics, who are now working to apply technology to fix some of the biggest challenges of the gig economy. In 2018, a team at University College London (UCL) and Lancaster University investigated how human-computer interaction could improve efficiency and sustainability of the last-mile-delivery sector, analysing where and how delivery drivers moved around a city. At the time, they quickly found that the average speed of a delivery vehicle is just nine kilometres an hour. The reason is that the sheer number of vehicles needed to keep our e-commerce habits sated means inner-city traffic has ground to a halt. And it hasn’t improved since then. The number of vans on our roads has increased 47.5 per cent in the last 20 years, at a time when overall vehicle numbers have dropped 11 per cent. More than four million vans crawl 8.8 billion kilometres around the country every year.
In all, 62 per cent of a driver’s working day is spent with their vehicles parked at the curbside as they deliver parcels on foot. Once drivers arrived at a delivery area, they drove for around 12 kilometres, but walked for around eight km.
“We looked at opportunities for tech to improve the efficiency of logistics,” says Oliver Bates, research fellow at Lancaster University, who was behind the initial research with colleagues, including Sarah Wise and Julian Allen at UCL. Some of the researchers’ suggestions were radical: they recommended courier companies collaborate by sharing vans and drivers to try and reduce the load on city streets.
“It was a proof of concept to show how different carriers could work together, particularly in dense urban areas like London, to reduce their driven mileage and better utilise their fleets,” says Bates. One analysis by Bates and his colleagues found three couriers from three different companies spent their shifts criss-crossing each other’s routes in the same part of a city on the same day. Separate modelling by Colombian researchers found utilisation of fleets could be improved ten per cent by collaborating on deliveries, while carbon dioxide emissions could drop 25 per cent. But no one listened. During the pandemic, when the demand for home delivery increased by 29 per cent and thousands of couriers were hired by big players such as Deliveroo, drivers complained that they were spending more time waiting around and were earning less than ever before, and no delivery companies tabled the idea of joining forces.
Faced with this worsening situation, Bates and other academics have decided to not just try and fix the logistical snags of the gig economy – but to help solve the underlying problems for those engaged in this line of work, including how they’re treated by the platforms. “People who do logistics and operational research focus very much on efficiency gains when they talk about sustainability,” says Bates. They look at improving the use of vehicles and reducing the number of miles they travel, rather than considering the impact on the humans behind the steering wheel and the handlebars, he explains.
In a project called FlipGig Bates, alongside researchers at Lancaster University and the University of Southampton, set out to identify and highlight the issues gig economy couriers face – and to offer solutions to improve the way they work. “It started with this idea of: ‘How do we flip the gig economy and make it more beneficial for workers?’” says Carolynne Lord, one of the team behind FlipGig and a senior research associate at Lancaster University. “How can we make it better, more fair and sustainable,” adds Bates. The seven-strong team has spent three years analysing data and surveying those on the front line of the gig economy about the issues they faced. Signing up participants involved walking the streets of UK cities and talking to delivery couriers as they worked, convincing them to join workshops where they could thrash out solutions to the problems.
They asked gig-economy couriers to track how they spent their time at work in Edinburgh, have held workshops with couriers in Manchester and York in a separate study called SwitchGig to listen to couriers’ concerns, and carried out surveys of the algorithms the big on-demand delivery apps use. What they ended up with was a mountain of data, which they are still analysing.
Of all the issues they discovered, job allocation is one of the most problematic that on-demand couriers encounter, says Lord. “There’s a difference between being allocated a job that is only worth a few pounds, compared to one that’s a bit more,” she explains. Deliveroo, for instance, only pays workers for the time they spend with food in their hand. “The waiting in the restaurant, and the waiting for customers to find their keys and come to the door aren’t paid,” says Lord. And that’s before time spent crawling curbs, waiting for jobs to come in.
On-demand delivery apps make a great deal of the fact that they offer flexibility for their contracted workers, but the realities of work are more difficult. “You can work at 8am on a Monday if you fancy, but if you think about it, it’s when people want takeaways,” says Lord. “We were interested in the unpredictability of it all, and what it was like to be a worker dictated by an app.
This situation is made worse by the fact that only experienced couriers understand when there is money to be made and where they need to be to make it. Only people who have been through the trial and errors of gig work know tips and tricks about when to accept and refuse jobs. Two couriers Lord spoke to showed what the gulf in nous can mean to a worker’s pay packet. “One person made between £6 and £7 an hour. But another person made £18 an hour,” says Lord. “They rejected a hell of a lot of jobs.”
One solution being investigated by academics to improve workers’ rights is the path to a truly flexible gig economy: allowing a courier to work for Deliveroo over a busy lunch hour, then move on to fulfilling parcel deliveries in the afternoon, before moving back to a meal delivery service for the evening rush. “We’re looking at whether that’s feasible, and trying to understand what the thrash and the rhythm of delivery courier work is,” says Bates. “Initially at the start of the project, I thought everyone should have a contract,” admits Lord. But that changed from conversations with gig economy workers, some of whom valued the flexibility that it offered them. The researchers want to present their findings to the gig economy platforms, and to politicians, to try and improve workers’ rights.
They are not alone. The Oxford Internet Institute’s Fairwork Foundation has also grappled with some of these issues, producing five key principles of gig work they think ought to be followed (see sidebar). The platforms seem to be sluggish in their response to the principles: in July, just three of 11 popular platforms graded out of ten by the foundation gained a score of five or more.
But it’s not just the services powering the gig economy that need to change. The academics say that policymakers in national and local government need to sit up and take notice. “We need to see city infrastructure designed properly,” says Bates. “Are there enough bike racks? Are there the right lanes for traffic on the roads?” Given the snarls that blight city centres as gig economy companies stick resolutely to their inefficient current models of operation, the answer seems to be no. “Those kinds of questions would be good to see city planners think about.”
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
