The Impact of Your Online Shopping Habits

Weather: Dry and sunny, with a high in the mid-60s.

Alternate-side parking: In effect until Friday (All Saints Day).

The Times’s Matthew Haag and Winnie Hu report:

Click, click, purchase. Days (or sometimes hours) later, a package arrives.

Thanks to the internet and behemoths like Amazon and FreshDirect, buying food, shoes, diapers and televisions has never been easier. In New York City, more than 1.5 million packages are delivered daily.

But there is a price for convenience: gridlock, roadway safety problems and pollution.

Who’s buying?

Over the past decade, the average number of daily deliveries to households in New York City has tripled, according to the Center of Excellence for Sustainable Urban Freight Systems at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Households now receive more shipments than businesses do, pushing trucks into neighborhoods where they had rarely ventured.

About 15 percent of New York City households receive a package every day, according to the center. That means a complex with 800 apartments would receive roughly 120 packages daily.

Who’s delivering?

Amazon, UPS, FedEx and FreshDirect are among the main couriers.

In some neighborhoods, Amazon’s ubiquitous boxes are stacked and sorted on the sidewalk, sometimes on top of coverings spread out like picnic blankets.

What’s the impact?

New York City is collecting more money in fines. FedEx, FreshDirect, Peapod and UPS racked up just over 515,000 summonses for parking violations in 2018, totaling $27 million in fines, according to the city.

In 2013, those same companies received about 372,000 summonses and paid $21.8 million.

The city has more congestion. While the rise of ride-hailing services like Uber has unquestionably caused more traffic, the proliferation of trucks has worsened the problem.

The main entryway for packages into New York City, leading to the George Washington Bridge from New Jersey, has become the most congested interchange in the country.

Trucks heading toward the bridge travel 23 miles per hour, down from 30 m.p.h. five years ago.

You can expect to see more warehouses. Neighborhoods like Red Hook in Brooklyn are being used as logistics hubs to get packages to customers faster than ever. At least two million square feet of warehouse space is being built in New York City, including what will be the largest building of its kind in the country. Amazon added two warehouses here over the summer.

Officials are racing to keep track of the numerous warehouses sprouting up, to create more zones for trucks to unload and to encourage some deliveries to be made by boat as the city struggles to cope with a booming online economy.

What we’re reading

A 14-year-old boy was shot and killed on a basketball court in Queens. [New York Post]

Two women confronted Harvey Weinstein at a private event for young artists and were thrown out. Now, a Lower East Side bar is facing a backlash. [Eater]

Staten Island may get a new health and wellness diabetes center. [Staten Island Advance]

Coming up today

Learn about pollution with Our Plastic Problem at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn. 8 p.m. [Free with R.S.V.P.]

“Make Them Hear You,” at the Park Avenue United Methodist Church in Manhattan, features songs from new musicals written by artists of color. 7:30 p.m. [$15]

A discussion with the director Levan Akin follows a screening of “And Then We Danced” at Scandinavia House in Manhattan. 7 p.m. [$12]

Hear about plant-based entrepreneurship at General Assembly in Manhattan. 6:30 p.m. [$10]

— Julia Carmel

Events are subject to change, so double-check before heading out. For more events, see the going-out guides from The Times’s culture pages.

And finally: Updating ‘Activist New York’

Abby Ellin reports:

New Yorkers are a feisty bunch, with no shortage of opinions. That may help explain why so many social justice movements were started, or accelerated, here.

“Activist New York,” a continuing installation at the Museum of the City of New York in Manhattan, features a number of them: Black Lives Matter, the Young Lords, immigration, civil rights, women’s rights and trans activism.

“The show doesn’t perceive of activism on one side of the ideological spectrum,” said Sarah J. Seidman, the Puffin Foundation curator of social activism at the museum. “I wanted to get at tactics and methods of protest in addition to ideology. We took an intersectional approach.”

She added: “We are always adding material to keep the show fresh. I’d like to have more of an indigenous presence.”

So far, there are no specific installations dedicated to Occupy Wall Street or the #MeToo movement.

“There are logistical challenges to putting objects in the gallery right as people are mobilizing,” Dr. Seidman said. “Both of these topics have found their way into the exhibition in different ways, but we’ve wanted to see how these events unfold and evaluate their significance as movements so that we can present meaningful historical analysis through objects.”

For Occupy Wall Street, the museum has several photographs of the protests in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan. And the curators had #MeToo in mind for the suffrage centennial of 2020 when they put in a section on the women’s liberation movement of the 1970s.

Newer exhibits include a section on Vietnam War protests, which examines New York City’s role in mobilizing against the war from 1965 to 1975; the Movement for Black Lives from 2012 to 2017; and 50 years of transgender activism.

It’s Monday — get active.

Metropolitan Diary: ‘I live in Queens’

Dear Diary:

On a recent trip to Copenhagen, I experienced not only the warmth of the Danes but also the snobbery of some of my fellow New Yorkers toward the place I call home: Queens.

At a synagogue one evening, I began to speak with the woman next to me. I learned that she, like me, was a native New Yorker.

“Where in New York do you live?” I asked.

“Manhattan,” she said. “The Upper West Side.”

“I live in Queens.”

“I don’t know Queens at all,” she said.

“But I know Manhattan,” I said. I kept myself from saying I knew the other boroughs pretty well, too.

Two days later, on a boat ride through Copenhagen’s canals, I asked a couple next to me where they were from.

“New York,” the woman replied.

“Me, too,” I said. “Where in New York do you live?”

“Manhattan.”

“I live in Queens,” I said.

Her husband, who had been staring silently out the boat, suddenly chimed in.

“We live in Long Island City,” he said.

“That’s not Manhattan,” I said, and with only a hint of sarcasm. “But the No. 7 train will get you there in one stop.”

— Cara S. Trager

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