>Around the country, more than 1.7 million packages are stolen or go missing every day — adding up to more than $25 million in lost goods and services, accordin

>Around the country, more than 1.7 million packages are stolen or go missing every day — adding up to more than $25 million in lost goods and services, according to an analysis for The Times by José Holguín-Veras, an engineering professor and director of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Center of Excellence for Sustainable Urban Freight Systems. 1) the value of goods seems off. How can the average package only be 15 bucks? ( I wonder if they are keeping the costs down to deter people from stealing 2) What the heck is "Sustainable Urban Freight Systems?" >Gabriel Cepeda, 23, came up with the idea for a start-up company built around collecting packages, called Pickups Technologies, after his own Amazon order of computer hard drives was stolen last year outside of his parents’ home in New Jersey. He spent hours on the phone trying to get his order replaced. “It was bad enough to motivate me to brainstorm,” he said.Now Mr. Cepeda’s company connects online shoppers with a network of about 30 residents in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg who will accept packages at their homes at all hours, for fees ranging from $4.99 for a single delivery, to $9.99 for a monthly service. The company plans to expand to more neighborhoods. Decent idea, but the liability has to be insane. I think he would need to grow rather large in order to cover insurance costs if God forbid a few of these people decided to sue if something valuable were damaged/stolen. It literally sounds like finding people who are not working ( retired, elderly, stay at home, disabled, etc, ) who are home at x time per day. Sounds like a crazy optimization problem. >In New York, the police do not break out stolen packages into a separate category. Instead, these cases generally fall under grand larceny if an item is valued at more than $1,000, or petit larceny if valued at less. With all that budget, why cannot they keep statistics on package theft? Seems like the city is behind the times.