In the Media

The shift to grocery delivery should be good news for sustainability because having a truck drop off multiple orders is more efficient than everyone driving their vehicle to the store. But "some delivery services are not on the consolidation model," says our Anne Goodchild.

Jeff Bezos says ordering groceries online is better for the planet. Is he right? Our Anne Goodchild comments.

The idea of a grocery store as a terminal — instead of a consumer shopping center — is likely to gain traction as a result of the pandemic, said Anne Goodchild, director of the Urban Freight Lab.

Anne Goodchild is featured expert in Convoy's new video series on COVID-19 and its impact on the freight market.

“Buying online or not doesn’t account for the main variable,” Anne Goodchild says. “The main variable is how far away did something come from. And then how quickly did you demand that it get to you.

Seattle’s Urban Freight Lab continues to churn out innovative research projects connected to the last 50 feet of delivery. The latest initiative is a “common microhub."

Anne Goodchild said, “as we move towards faster delivery, it gets harder to consolidate. When we’re not paying some sort of personal cost for the trip, I think it’s easy to overlook how much travel we’re adding.”

The University of Washington’s Urban Freight Lab is testing common lockers in commercial buildings and near transit stops in Seattle. An initial pilot at the Seattle Municipal Tower found that the system reduced the number of failed deliveries to zero and reduced the overall delivery time by 78 percent when compared to door-to-door delivery.

Anne Goodchild questions some of the conclusions of the World Economic Forum's "The Future of the Last-Mile Ecosystem" report, saying its figures are based on many assumptions.

According to Anne Goodchild of the University of Washington, the last mile could represent half of the cost to distribute a product from its source. 

“There are strong incentives to test out autonomous vehicles where they don’t have that labor cost,” said Anne Goodchild, founding director of the Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center at the University of Washington.

"When we’re not paying some sort of personal cost for the trip, I think it’s easy to overlook how much travel we’re adding," said Anne Goodchild.

“It’s a very costly system. It’s expensive to do the last mile, but no one in the existing framework can take it on and fix it,” said Anne Goodchild, lead researcher on the project and founding director of the UW’s Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center.

Anne Goodchild, professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of Washington, said there are ways in which deliveries could be greener. “A delivery vehicle can consolidate, like a bus, many packages or many orders of groceries into one vehicle,” she said. But for that to work, we might have to give up our two-day delivery habit.

“Significant growth in online shopping is causing increasing demand for urban deliveries, whereas space for delivery vehicles to travel and park is limited,” said Anne Goodchild, a researcher at the University of Washington’s Urban Freight Lab.