In the Media

When you're sending or returning a package it's easy to forget the obstacles delivery drivers will go through to get it to its final destination on time.

Anne Goodchild, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle, and director of the school’s Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center, agrees that Europe has made significantly greater strides than the U.S. in terms of coordinated Smart City Logistics management and response. However, "the environment is different in the U.S. Here, we’re more focused on consumers, and we’re moving much faster than Europe when it comes to offering fast, timely and convenient deliveries," she said.

The University of Washington ... is also home to the Urban Freight Lab, an innovative research consortium that brings public- and private-sector partners to work on some of the most pressing challenges created by the e-commerce revolution.

“The problem isn’t buying online — it’s how the delivery is implemented and how packages come to our door,” said Anne Goodchild, director of the University of Washington’s Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center.

The project—funded with $1.5 million by DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy’s Vehicle Technologies Office and led by the University of Washington’s Urban Freight Lab—will develop, test, and improve technologies aimed at cutting time spent by the driver at the curb, increasing productivity, and reducing time and fuel spent searching for available parking.

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."

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

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. 

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.