Delivery Walk Speeds

[clashcityrocker]

You are talking rubbish. As Fishtank explained earlier in the thread:

These are just travelling speeds.
If it was inclusive of call times and replenishment you would have to sprint like Usain Bolt between the doors.

[Lincox]

So these are just travelling speeds hey Clash. I would like to see you keep these up day in day out, five days a week, 48 weeks a year. Lets see the evidence that Royal Mail and the CWU have to justify that it is humanly possible to maintain these TRAVELLING speeds throughout a 4 hour period or more. Why have they never commented on the T/V documentary whereby a Royal marine was unable to meet some of these speeds without having to carry or push/pull a heavily laden bag around, and this was just over one day. Why should we be treated like those working on a chain gang.

[Big Daz]

The travelling speeds are not constant,therefore one is constantly speeding up and slowing down

[andy2007]

True. But that means that you'd have to peak at significantly higher speeds, to achieve the average. Which whilst carrying Mail, is a daunting challenge, don't you think?
Remember the Marine who tried doing a walk at RM's intended speeds?

[clashcityrocker]

If you were doing a 4hr delivery @ 4mph your walk would be 16 miles. Nobody walks 16 miles/day on their delivery because the 4mph only relates to the walking between delivery points. It doesn't include your dead walking, interaction with customers, drop boxes etc. I would be surprised if anyone walks above 10 miles which equates to an average speed of 2.5mph.
4 mph isn't very fast. I use it as a warm down speed on the treadmill. I know exactly how fast it is and I doubt if many people actually walk that slowly out on delivery.

[Lincox]

So Daz, at what top speed do you think I would need to be walking at to average 3.69 miles per hour, assuming that the last hour I will have slowed down to near snail pace due to exhaustion.

[Lincox]

Clash, next time your on your treadmill, put a 16kg bag on your shoulder, and see if it,s a pacing down speed. You obviously do not work on deliveries, because if you did you would be to shagged to go to a Gym.

[fishtank]

If you were doing a 4hr delivery @ 4mph your walk would be 16 miles. Nobody walks 16 miles/day on their delivery because the 4mph only relates to the walking between delivery points. It doesn't include your dead walking, interaction with customers, drop boxes etc. I would be surprised if anyone walks above 10 miles which equates to an average speed of 2.5mph.
4 mph isn't very fast. I use it as a warm down speed on the treadmill. I know exactly how fast it is and I doubt if many people actually walk that slowly out on delivery.

No offence CCR but you don't push a 105kg HCT on the treadmill.
Also as was pointed out by Daz this is an average travelling speed including acceleration and deceleration between delivery points.
That in itself doesn't sound significant but if you do it 650+ times in a delivery it means that your optimum travelling speed between delivery points will actually need to be significantly higher than 4mph.

[clashcityrocker]

I obviously do work in delivery Lincox.
If you follow the bag weight matrix you should only have one 16kg bag and that should be on the flat.
But since this is what you want to hear - your top speed will need to be around 135mph in order to reach the average of
3.whatever. Happy now?

FT - no offence taken. You are right I don't push a HCT on the treadmill. (I think there will be very few posties pushing HCTs.) I do however know how fast it is.(and isn't)
And it doesn't alter the fact that the idea that the 4mph over a 4hr delivery equates to a 16 mile delivery is wrong.

[fishtank]

I do however know how fast it is.(and isn't)
And it doesn't alter the fact that the idea that the 4mph over a 4hr delivery equates to a 16 mile delivery is wrong.

Well it may not feel fast to you but that could be because it is inside your "comfortable walking pace".
Comfortable walking pace is not a made up speed but is a factor of your height,build,stride pattern and age.
It produces what is known as Muscular Skeletal Equilibrium or....perfect balance.
If you move outside of this balance you are much more prone to accident or injury.
And yes i agree with you it is not 4mph for the entire delivery although it may be more than 4hrs.

[clashcityrocker]

FT - I have spent about 20 minutes reading about musculoskeletal equilibrium.
And you are right (when aren't you) that 4mph is within my comfort zone.
The question then is - is it reasonable for RM to expect 4mph to be within everyone's comfort zone?
Personally I have never seen a postie walk that slowly.

It will be daunting for someone coming from a desk job to being a postie which is why there should be training walks.
It also will be for people over 60 when the "comfortable walking pace" will naturally begin to drop.Normally seniority comes to their rescue.

But I don't think 4mph is anything to get over-excited about.
If we go back to the Marine. Obviously the walk was too long for the postie. Whatever info they had fed in was s**t which is why they got s**t back out. If they wanted him to walk 14 miles in 3.5 hrs then that would be one thing, but they shouldn't have expected him to deliver the mail as well.

[fishtank]

OBJECTIVES:: to establish reference values for both comfortable and maximum gait speed and to describe the reliability of the gait speed measures and the correlation of selected variables with them.

DESIGN:: descriptive and cross-sectional.

METHODS:: subjects were 230 healthy volunteers. Gait was timed over a 7.62 m expanse of floor. Actual and height normalized speed were determined. Lower extremity muscle strength was measured with a hand-held dynamometer.

RESULTS:: mean comfortable gait speed ranged from 127.2 cm/s 2.84mph for women in their seventies to 146.2 cm/s 3.26mph for men in their forties. Mean maximum gait speed ranged from 174.9 cm/s 3.8mph for women in their seventies to 253.3 cm/s 5.6mph for men in their twenties.

[fishtank]

COMFORTABLE WALKING SPEED: NORMS FOR ADULTS DERIVED USING METAANALYSIS

Background and Purpose: Interpreting individuals’ gait speed requires the availability of norms. As information about normal gait speed is often from samples of convenience or small size, we undertook this metaanalysis to derive a better estimate of walking speed.

Methods: We identified relevant literature via PubMed and the terms “normal, comfortable, usual, preferred, and self-selected” combined with “gait speed and walking speed.”
As a followup,reference list checks and hand-searches were performed. Information on sample characteristics, procedures, and gait speed were abstracted from relevant articles. A macro was used to consolidate gait speed data by gender and decade.

Results: Forty-four studies contributed data from 18,752 subjects. Most data were homogeneous. Mean comfortable gait speed for subjects under 60 years old ranged from 137.9 3.08mph to 144.8 cm/sec 3.24mph for men and 132.7 2.97mph to 139.5 cm/sec 3.12mph for women.

Conclusions: This study provides norms for comfortable gait speed that may provide a more accurate estimate of normal speed than individual studies.

And these are comfortable walking speeds over relatively short distances without delivering mail.
They are just studies and i'm not saying it's fact but it does give you an idea of what is considered a comfortable pace to walk at.
You are not in training for 2012 are you CCR?

[clashcityrocker]

You are not in training for 2012 are you CCR?

Depends on my times at 2010.
Seriously - nearly 50, asthmatic, probably diabetic, surgery on both knees. If 4mph doesn't worry me it shouldn't really worry anyone else.

[dvbuk55]

You are not in training for 2012 are you CCR?

Depends on my times at 2010.
Seriously - nearly 50, asthmatic, probably diabetic, surgery on both knees. If 4mph doesn't worry me it shouldn't really worry anyone else.

Well that has seriously damaged your chick magnetism ccr - I mean who's going to go for a geriatric asthmatic who can't get on his knees , unless of course you have money, a fast car or some other physical attribute:chuckle