April 6, 2026 Issue

Pick of the Issue this week is Henry Alford’s “Talk” story “Special Deliveries.” It’s about a New York City distribution program called Blue Highways aimed at decreasing truck emissions and road congestion. Instead of trucks, the program uses boats and cargo bikes to deliver up to eight hundred parcels a day. In his piece, Alford follows a parcel – “a featherweight, toaster-size box from Sephora, addressed to 235 West Forty-eighth Street” – and charts its progress:

At 2 a.m., the package was on a truck from Sephora’s distribution center in Aberdeen, Maryland. At about 3 a.m., it arrived on the Red Hook waterfront at a vast terminal owned by a company called Dutch X, a next-day-delivery service committed to lowering carbon-dioxide emissions. By 10 a.m., the package, along with some two hundred others, had been placed in one of nine Kevlar totes and nestled onto four steel-cage dollies. A Dutch X employee wheeled these onto a small blue-and-white passenger ferry at the Red Hook Ferry Terminal. 

The parcel goes on a twenty-three-minute ride to Pier 79, on Manhattan’s West Side. Alford continues:

At 10:44 a.m., after docking near West Thirty-ninth Street, a thousand and fifty-six feet above trucks stuck in traffic in the Lincoln Tunnel, the package was assigned to a Dutch X biker named C Jay Jaime, a Brooklyn-born, thirty-four-year-old father of three, who would be riding around town on a special pedal-assist e-bike that came equipped with a windshield, a roof, and an attached trailer. Jaime, who had on a yellow reflective vest and a helmet, held up his phone near his supervisor’s and, courtesy of the FarEye app, instantly received the coördinates for the packages—a total of forty-five—he’d be delivering. “This should take about six hours,” he said. The Sephora box would be his nineteenth of the day. He removed the parcel from its Kevlar tote and placed it on a shelf in the trailer. The D.O.T. estimates that two cargo bikes can do the work of a van or a box truck. Moreover, the trim little contraption cut a wholesome figure reminiscent of a Richard Scarry book—as if a courtesy tram birthed a tiny Zamboni.

Alford follows Jaime on his route: 

At 1:24 p.m., Jaime parked his bike on Eighth Avenue at Forty-ninth Street. Clutching package No. 19, destined for a block away, he said, “Sometimes it takes longer to drive around the corner than to walk there.”

The piece concludes:

On arriving at 235 West Forty-eighth Street, a tall building called the Ritz Plaza, Jaime’s eyes widened; the reception desk was already covered with boxes from Amazon, stacked three high.

“This is every day, every day,” a middle-aged man behind the desk said, in a tone midway between exasperation and resignation. Jaime cleared a space and deposited No. 19. The eagle—a lipstick? a loofah?—had landed.

“Special Deliveries” shows a great new transportation program in action. I enjoyed it immensely.