Yes, you read the title right!  Swiss health officials began a new program last Thursday offering Geneva, Bern and Zurich citizens the chance to order condoms by phone as part of a campaign to fight AIDS.

For £5, people can have condoms delivered to their door within an hour or less

“Young people should always carry condoms with them”, they said in a news release. But now within an hour or less, bike couriers can “come to aid of those who have forgotten.”

For about 8 Swiss francs (£5), people can get three condoms delivered to their doors.

The project, a part of Switzerland’s “LOVE LIFE STOP AIDS” campaign, will last until the end of July.

Campaign manager Norina Schwendener said: “The couriers are simply the perfect people to remind people in a pleasant way of our message that one should always have condoms available.”

After a disappointing Copenhagen summit, decline in public interest and fuel efficiency, the haulage industry needs a lot more attention and action to be able to achieve its target of CO2 reduction.

In the third Freight Transport Association (FTA) Logistics Carbon Reduction Conference in London last week, Professor Alan McKinnon of Heriot-Watt Univeristy said that the ice is still melting and transport emissions are the fastest growing source of CO2, accounting for around 25 percent of the national total, with freight activities constituting a quarter of that.

Haulage industry accounts for about 7% of the national CO2 emissions

He also said signification action is required by haulage companies to meet the target of reducing 80% emissions by 2050.

Currently, duel-fuel and electric vehicles are promising, however they are both expensive to deploy and there are limits to their scalability.

At Shiply we believe that whilst duel-fuel and electric vehicles can and will help reduce CO2 emitted from individual vehicles, a larger part of the problem remains empty-running vehicles on the road.

Backloading is a simple, cost effective and environment-friendly solution to this issue and needs to be utilised a lot more in the haulage industry and promoted widely to the public.

Peter Lee, from Akeley, Buckinghamshire, began his obsession with vans since 1970s when he worked on a Transit assembly line.

Peter keeps his toy van collection in his attic

The van fan later moved to Spain with his wife where they lived a so called “hippy life” by Peter, fruit picking from the back of his beloved Transit.

Peter said :”Friends called me Mr White Van Man and they started to put the odd toy on my dashboard. After about one and a half years there I could hardly see out of the windscreen for toy vans.”

Since then, he started collecting van models seriously and thanks to the Internet, Peter was able to track down different models more easily.

Now he has one of the world largest toy van collection and also seven full-sized vans. One model in particular is a limited-edition 1976 van made to celebrate the one millionth Transit, now worth thousands of pounds.

The passionate collector says his hobby has a strong support from his wife.

“She wasn’t that interested at first, but she now owns her very own Bedford van,” he said.

Three Liverpool lads’ Wimbledon weekends were almost ruined, but for the help of Virgin trains staff.

Arriving in London on Friday, Aaron, Daniel and Chris were enjoying a beer in Clapham when Daniel’s face turned green after realising their Centre Court tickets were still on his mantle piece in Birkenhead!

Three Wimbledon tickets were quoted £800 for delivery!

They tried to call a Liverpool courier company for a quote, only to be given a sky high price of £800 for an overnight special delivery service (what a joke!).

Luckily, Daniel’s mom, trusting in her human kindness, quickly hailed a taxi to Liverpool Lime Street and persuaded the Virgin Trains driver to deliver the tickets to London Euston.

The tickets were duly collected after 9.50am on Saturday when the train arrived and the lads had an unforgettable Wimbledon experience.

Well done to Richard Branson and his helpful staff!

Although not a regular service by any means, we really like the use of trains like this for urgent deliveries, instead of putting a new vehicle on the road and the wasteful emissions this causes.

By the way, this is our profile page on virgin.com, if you also have an account there, feel free to become friends with us:

http://www.virgin.com/user/shiply/info/

Ian Murdoch, a retired haulage boss, is dodging costly park fees by hiding his caravan as a log truck.

Mr. Murdoch, 69, got fed up paying for hotels when travelling around the UK. He then put his five berth caravan on the back of a vintage lorry and hid it under timber.

Ian Murdoch and his timber-truck-caravan

Ian, of Laurieston, Dumfries-shire, said: “It’s an ideal place to stay. I planned to build a log cabin on the back but that was too big a project. So I bought a caravan and put that on the back. You can’t see it from outside, but plenty of light comes in.”

Ian takes the 35 year old Atkinson Border lorry to vintage vehicle shows across the UK and surprises onlookers when he reveals the hidden entrance.

“You should see their faces”, said Ian.

FedEx show us why pigeons delivery services are no longer popular…

Royal Mail disclosed recently that in the 12 months to the end of March, just 87.9 per cent of First Class mail arrived on time. This means almost one in eight letters arrived late.

The national postal operator blamed the poor performance on the bad weather at the beginning of this year and the postal strikes last Autumn which had considerable impacts on the postal system.

Only 7 out of 8 First Class mails arrived on time last year

In contrast, Second Class mail delivery service performed extremely well with 96.7 per cent arrived on time.

Robert Hammon, head of post and digital communications at Consumer Focus said: “These results are a mixed bag for Royal Mail customers. It is encouraging to see such a strong performance last Spring, but consumers will be disappointed to see the poor performance around the strikes.”

Mark Higson, Royal Mail’s managing director said the figures were a big improvement on the poor performance figures over the strike period.

He said: “Everyone in Royal Mail is focused on restoring quality of service to the target-beating levels we achieved a year ago.”

Royal Mail’s “quality of service” figures were based on 960,000 sample letters, parcels and packets sent to thousands of test addresses throughout the year.

Former haulage driver Alan Campbell, a cancer patient was shocked when his hospital appointment was refused because they told him “he was dead”!

Alan Campbell was astonished when told he was dead, clearly he wasn’t so convinced!

Mr. Campbell was told by an NHS call centre operative to go to his GP to “get it sorted”, even after he tried to reason with them by saying: “I’m talking to you, aren’t I?”

Alan, from Blackburn was anxious for an appointment as he feared his skin cancer had spread to his throat. He then called up the NHS service which aims to allow patients to choose which hospital they wish to attend to provide “greater convenience and certainty”, only to be told that he was dead and so couldn’t book it!

Mr. Campbell said: “I’m not one for complaining but when somebody says you’re dead it’s not on.”

The NHS Trust which is responsible for the phone service has apologised to Mr. Campbell about the incident.

Shiply have achieved another important milestone in our history: 10,000,000 otherwise wasteful miles saved through use of the site since our launch in June 2008.

Putting this number into perspective, it equates to more than 400 trips around the world!

Without your contributions as valued Shiply members we could not have achieved this so thank you all very much for being such an integral part of this achievement.

It is important to environment, as the more wasteful miles we can save, the more un-necessary CO2 emissions we are able to reduce.  We look forward to many million more miles saved over the coming years.

eBay shipping

Volvo just released a commercial video featuring its delivery truck of the future – Concept Truck 2020. Although still a concept, it looks very promising!

Enjoy and have a great weekend!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMcNq36IhY4]