March 9, 2023 — Urban Freight Lab researchers José Machado, Gabriela Girón-Valderrama, Anne Goodchild, and Ed McCormack have published a new report on Supporting Comprehensive Urban Freight Planning by Mapping Private Load and Unload Facilities — the first urban inventory of private load and unload infrastructure and a demonstrated valuable resource for the City of Seattle to better understand and plan for the urban freight system.
Typically located both outside the public right-of-way and not found in publicly available databases, private load and unload infrastructure is widely unknown and not considered in cities’ complete system-wide freight planning and comprehensive evaluation of load and unload spaces. This research fills that gap and includes transferable methodology, practice-ready tools, and a demonstrative case study that other cities can implement to support research, policy, and planning approaches to improve their own urban freight systems.
The team recorded 337 private load and unload freight facilities in the more than 4,000 buildings in a nearly 4 square mile area in downtown Seattle and adjacent Uptown, South Lake Union, First Hill, and Capitol Hill.
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About the Urban Freight Lab (UFL): An innovative public-private partnership housed at the Supply Chain Transportation & Logistics Center at the University of Washington, the Urban Freight Lab is a structured workgroup that brings together private industry with City transportation officials to design and test solutions around urban freight management.