Propane Taxi reduces car dependence

Last week, we got a propane grill. Of course, we immediately then found ourselves in need of a propane tank. The local hardware store doesn’t stock tanks, but before we had to venture far away by car, we discovered Propane Taxi. They drive a tank to your door, exchanging it for the old one (or giving you a new tank if that’s what you order, as we did). I placed the order on Friday afternoon and had the tank by lunchtime Saturday.

These sorts of businesses make it possible to accomplish more of life’s tasks without driving. Many people (like us) will choose to still own cars, but the more choices consumers have, the less traffic we’ll get.

Grocery delivery isn’t quite so convenient. New York City has FreshDirect, which makes ordering groceries extremely easy: they have good quality stuff, a very easy-to-use Web site, and reasonable prices (lower than many Manhattan supermarkets, plus only $5 for delivery). Safeway’s delivery works fine, but their site is more awkward, the delivery charges higher ($12.95 for a two-hour window and $9.95 for four), and the options more limited. At least when we tried it late last year, you couldn’t get less than a pound of cold cuts, for example, and anything out of stock at the store wouldn’t arrive in your order or would be substituted by the shopper.

Since you’re basically just paying someone to run around the store and grab items for you, it’s naturally going to cost more, compared to FreshDirect which runs an automated warehouse to assemble your order. Safeway was always sending me specials, but ones that only applied to orders of $150 or more (the minimum is $50). That might be okay for families, but we only buy that much food once in a while, for big parties, and that’s when we’re most willing to make a car trip to a big supermarket.

There’s a chicken-and-egg problem in grocery delivery—the more people use it, the cheaper it can be, but at the current cost, it’s not attractive enough to use. Maybe our city is just not dense enough to support grocery delivery as successful as FreshDirect, or perhaps nobody has tried the right formula yet.

I’d love to see more restaurants available on SeamlessWeb, especially outside the downtown office area. SeamlessWeb makes takeout food enormously easier to order compared to shuffling through a pile of menus. (I don’t even have a pile of menus, and can’t easily find out what restaurants deliver to my house except those on SeamlessWeb.)

What other businesses reduce car dependence here in the DC area?