In the Media

Think of your average delivery driver. Our job is to increase their productivity and reduce the time and fuel spent searching for available parking.

“It’s very uncommon—if you look at the numbers—that [an Amazon] package is lost or late,” says Anne Goodchild, Ph.D., director of the Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center at the University of Washington. ”They’ve got so much tracking and quality control. It’s really hard to do that at the scale that they operate. If you get half a percent of packages wrong, it’s still a really big number for them.”

Home delivery, however, may be better for the environment than customers driving their own cars to shop. “Trucks are bigger; trucks are heavier; trucks are more polluting,” said Anne Goodchild. “But we have to remember that that truck is actually like a bus for groceries. That truck is visiting many homes. And what our research shows is that the truck is more efficient.”

The last mile is the “current” obsession of the supply chain industry because it can be the most costly, said Anne Goodchild, founding director of the Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center at the University of Washington. 

Lessons from other cities that have started replacing trucks with bikes.

Invited to the nation’s capital, CEE professor Anne Goodchild presented testimony on December 5 at a joint hearing before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Highways and Transit and the Subcommittee on Railroads, Pipelines and Hazardous Materials.
 

Anne Goodchild, the director of the University of Washington’s Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center, pointed out that cargo bikes are smaller, nimbler and easier to maneuver than trucks and emit no greenhouse gases.

A delivery truck can carry 400 parcel packages on average, versus the 40 parcels a cargo bike can take, according to a study published this year by the Urban Freight Lab.

“There’s definitely the potential for delivery services to be an environmental asset,” said Anne Goodchild, director of the University of Washington’s Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center.

With online shopping now accounting for roughly 10% of retail purchases, companies are working hard to deliver packages faster than ever — and with the changing delivery landscape, there are some growing pains. Anne Goodchild, the director of Supply Chain Transport & Logistics at the University of Washington, says the delivery side of e-commerce is a work in progress.

Anne Goodchild says your item might be on its way to you before you even click to order.

Retailers are using machine learning technology to predict what shoppers may buy and then placing those items in stores and warehouses closer to them, said Anne Goodchild, the director of the Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center at the University of Washington.

“It’s contributing significantly to our carbon footprint as a region and as a country. And those are problems,” said Anne Goodchild, director of the University of Washington’s Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center.

In the U.S., the prevailing approach to freight policy is to rely on market-based solutions to achieve consumer convenience and profitability, explains University of Washington freight expert Anne Goodchild.

Delivery drones help reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but it’s complicated. Anne Goodchild says: “We shouldn’t just compare drones versus trucks.”