A trial of putting parcel lockers for online shopping in TfL car parks and stations is to be substantially expanded.
The locker firm, InPost has run a trial with TfL at six locations, and has now signed a deal to expand that to 60 locations across London. More than 25 new lockers have already been installed, with plans to double this by the end of the summer.
InPost locker at Oakwood tube station
Primarily situated within TfL’s car parks close by to tube and rail stations, the lockers allow selected retailers to drop off online shopping deliveries for collection by customers who might not be at home when the delivery is due. They also allow returns of unwanted items for some retailers.
Apart from the consumer benefit, the company touts the reduced road traffic caused by delivery vans driving door-to-door to drop off parcels.
Current live locations include Newbury Park tube station, Ickenham tube station and Victoria Coach station.
The new InPost lockers are set to be operational across more than 60 commuter station car parks by June 2021 and will be available for use from July 2021.
These are great aren’t they?
There used to be places called shops where you could go and try on/try out things for size, colour, quality and for a fee, even take them home at your convenience.
Also something called a postie who was a person who brought things to your door and if you weren’t there, left them with a friend next door or took them back to a big office from where you could pick them up out of the rain and in the warm.
Thankfully now we have a small number of boxes often safely outside in a windy station car park so anyone can get to them conveniently at all hours of the day and night looked after by a camera on a pole with some spikes on it (to look after the camera.)
Just as well that the more we use these, the fewer the chance encounters with our erstwhile known-to-us neighbours and the more we can and eventually will have no option but to use these improvements.
I hope that they’re future-proofed too with some sort of sorting mechanism on the top so that the longed-for whisper-quiet delivery drones can dump the latest box of personalised dog food into the correct bin, sorry, safebox from on high.
Okay, apologies for the doom and gloom tone and attempt at humour, but I bet that these useful-to-many boxes aren’t used as a stop gap: “you weren’t in so we’ve stuck it in box no. χ at your local station” seems eminently sensible to me. But would lead to a proliferation of the things.