The Great Blizzard of 1888 dumped more than 20 inches of snow on New York City, blowing down the thick web of power lines that were strung overhead. The city was plunged into darkness, and communications were disrupted for days while the dangerous live wires lay in the snow. The outage resulted in a city regulation to bury all cables in New York, a measure that was soon adopted in many other big cities.
Although the analogy certainly isn’t exact, I wonder if something similar may happen as cities deal with the explosion of delivery vehicles weaving a tangled web in their streets to fulfill Americans’ growing propensity for ordering everything they can off the internet. Industry people call this “the last mile,” the final journey of a small package from some sort of central hub to a business or residential address.
(Read more: GOVERNING.com)