Paper

Ecommerce and Logistics Sprawl: A Spatial Exploration of Last-Mile Logistics Platforms

URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2023.103692

Publication: Journal of Transport Geography

Volume: 112

Publication Date: 2023

Summary:

The rise of ecommerce helped fuel consumer appetite for quick home deliveries. One consequence has been the placing of some logistics facilities in proximity to denser consumer markets. The trend departs from prevailing discussion on “logistics sprawl,” or the proliferation of warehousing into the urban periphery. This study spatially and statistically explores the facility- and region-level dimensions that characterize the centrality of ecommerce logistics platforms. Analyzing 910 operational Amazon logistics platforms in 89 U.S. metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) between 2013 and 2021, this study estimates temporal changes in distances to relative, population centroids and population-weighted market densities. Results reveal that although some platforms serving last-mile deliveries are located closer to consumers than upstream distribution platforms to better fulfill time demands, centrality varies due to facility operating characteristics, market size, and when the platform opened.

Ecommerce has transformed the “consumption geography” of cities. These transformations have major implications for shopping behaviors and retail channels, last-mile operations and delivery mode choice, the management and pricing of competing uses for street and curb space, and the spatial ordering and functional role of logistics land uses. In the latter case, researchers have observed a diversification of logistics platforms to more efficiently serve home delivery demand. These platforms range from “dark stores” and “microfullfilment centers” that fulfill on-demand deliveries and omni-channeled retail without a consumer facing storefront, multi-use urban distribution centers that convert unproductive sites (e.g., abandoned rail depots) to more lucrative land uses, and “microhubs” that stage transloading between cargo vans and e-bicycles suited for dense urban neighborhoods.

Logistics spaces play an important role in improving urban livability and environmental sustainability. Planning decisions scale geographically from the region-level to the curb. Facilities such as urban consolidation centers and loading zones can mitigate common delivery inefficiencies, such as low delivery densities and “cruising” for parking, respectively. These inefficiencies generate many negative externalities including climate emissions, air and noise pollution, congestion, and heightened collision risks, especially for vulnerable road users such as pedestrians and bicyclists. Limited commercial data has made it difficult, however, to observe spatial patterns with regards to ecommerce logistics platforms.

Using detailed proprietary data, this paper explores the evolving spatial organization of ecommerce logistics platforms. Given the company’s preeminence as the leading online retailer in the U.S., the paper presents Amazon as a case study for understanding warehousing and distribution (W&D) activity in the larger ecommerce space. Utilizing proprietary data on Amazon logistics facilities between 2013 and 2021, this research explores the geographic shape and explanatory dimensions of ecommerce within major U.S. metropolitan areas. In the following section, this study defines the state of research related to broader W&D land use and its implications to ecommerce’s distinct consumption geography. Afterwards, two methodologies for measuring logistics centrality are tested: a temporally relative barycenter-based metric, the prevailing method in literature, and another GIS-based, population-weighted service distance metric. The two measurements reveal nuances between facility- and region-level differences in the spatial organization of ecommerce platforms, which has yet to be fully researched. After presenting results from an exploratory regression analysis, this study discusses implications for future urban logistics land use and transport decisions.

Authors: Travis FriedDr. Anne Goodchild

Recommended Citation:
Fried, T., & Goodchild, A. (2023). E-commerce and logistics sprawl: A spatial exploration of last-mile logistics platforms. Journal of Transport Geography, 112, 103692. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jtrangeo.2023.103692

Paper

Seeking Equity and Justice in Urban Freight: Where to Look?

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URL: https://doi.org/10.1080/01441647.2023.2247165

Publication: Transport Reviews

Publication Date: 2023

Summary:

What do equity and social justice mean for urban freight planning and management? New Urban Freight Lab paper reviews transportation and mobility justice theory and finds that urban freight issues are absent from these discussions, which primarily concern passenger and personal mobility. When urban freight is considered, authors usually discuss topics such as emissions, pollution, congestion, noise, and collisions. This paper looks more in-depth at urban freight justice, including access to essential goods, community governance, employment opportunities and barriers, and regional and global perspectives.

Urban freight systems embed and reflect spatial inequities in cities and imbalanced power structures within transport decision-making. These concerns are principal domains of “transportation justice” (TJ) and “mobility justice” (MJ) scholarship that have emerged in the past decade. However, little research exists situating urban freight within these prevailing frameworks, which leaves urban freight research on socio-environmental equity and justice ill-defined, especially compared to passenger or personal mobility discussions. Through the lens that derives from TJ and MJ’s critical dialogue, this study synthesizes urban freight literature’s engagement with equity and justice.

Namely, the review evaluates:

How do researchers identify equitable distributions of urban freight’s costs and benefits?
At what scale do researchers evaluate urban freight inequities?
And who does research consider entitled to urban freight equity and how are they involved in urban freight governance?

The findings help inform researchers who seek to reimagine urban freight management strategies within broader equity and justice discourse.

Decades-long growth in urbanization and the more recent surge in e-commerce have spurred concerns around the uneven impacts of freight’s swelling urban footprint. Transport scholars note increasing conflicts between freight vehicles and vulnerable road users, like bicyclists and pedestrians in dense urban areas. Meanwhile, environmental justice (EJ) scholars have long measured unequal exposure to freight traffic pollution along socio-economic and ethnic lines.

However, relatively few urban freight studies engage with social equity. Those that do usually avoid critical discussions contained in justice-oriented theory, instead portraying the movement of goods as an “apolitical science of circulation”. In the U.S., for instance, politicizing urban freight overlooks a history of city industrial zoning practices, infrastructure construction, exclusionary decision-making, and consequent path dependency that placed key logistics facilities including highways, manufacturing plants, warehouses and distribution centers disproportionately near low-income households and non-white, populations of color. The longitudinal effects of these institutional decisions are still largely visible today.

Transportation research also inconsistently defines and measures equity. In a review of equity in transportation literature, Lewis et al. describe equity as an empty conceptual space that “authors then fill … either explicitly with clearly defined arguments or implicitly with whatever idea of justice intuitively comes to mind” (p. 2). Arbitrarily engaging with equity concepts, the authors argue, creates confusion that is both normative (e.g. what does an equitable urban freight system look like?) and positive (e.g. what measurable thresholds determine whether an urban freight outcome is inequitable?). Consequently, most equity research measure unequal distributions of burdens and/or benefits but spend less time identifying when and why unequal distributions are unjust.

Therefore, this paper synthesizes prevailing discourse around equity and, by extension, justice in transportation research and urban freight literature.

Authors: Travis FriedDr. Anne Goodchild, Ivan Sanchez Diaz (Chalmers University), Michael Browne (Gothenburg University)

Recommended Citation:
Travis Fried, Anne Goodchild, Michael Browne & Ivan Sanchez-Diaz (2023). Seeking Equity and Justice in Urban Freight: Where to Look? Transport Reviews, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/01441647.2023.2247165

Paper

An Empirical Taxonomy of Common Curb Zoning Configurations in Seattle

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URL: https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.32446

Publication: Findings

Publication Date: 2022

Summary:

We utilize an unsupervised learning algorithm called-modes clustering (Huang 1998), which is similar to the better-known-means method (Hartigan and Wong 1979), but with a dissimilarity measure designed for categorical variables (Cao et al. 2012), originally developed for analyzing sequential categorical data such as gene sequences (Goodall 1966), but also amenable to curb zoning types. For a specified, the-modes algorithm finds the top vectors that minimize a distance to all sample vectors in the training dataset. The resulting top modes are representative of distinct clusters of sample vectors, with cluster membership determined by the closest mode. The parameter is chosen through cross-validation by holding out portions of the available training data and finding the smallest that largely minimizes the within-cluster variation in this hold-out set (also called the “elbow method”). We utilize basic matching dissimilarity, as implemented in (Vos 2015). For two vectors and of length, where each element attains categorical values, matching dissimilarity is defined as, where denotes the indicator vector, with value 1 where the bracketed condition is true and 0 otherwise. We’ve chosen this measure of dissimilarity between two sets of categorical variables for a number of reasons: 1) its simplicity, 2) successful use in categorical data clustering (Goodall 1966), and 3) its sensitivity to the ordering of values when vectors and are ordered, specific to how we have chosen to represent curb zoning data.

Authors: Thomas MaxnerDr. Andisheh Ranjbari, Chase Dowling

Recommended Citation:
Dowling, Chase P., Thomas Maxner, and Andisheh Ranjbari. 2022. “An Empirical Taxonomy of Common Curb Zoning Configurations in Seattle.” Findings, February. https://doi.org/10.32866/001c.32446

Paper

Curbspace Management Challenges and Opportunities from Public and Private Sector Perspectives

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URL: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03611981211027156

Publication: Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board

Publication Date: 2021

Summary:

Through structured interviews with public agency and private company staff and a review of existing pilot project evaluations and curb management guidelines, this study surveys contemporary approaches to curb space management in 14 U.S. cities and documents the challenges and opportunities associated with them. A total of 17 public agencies (including public works departments, transportation agencies, and metropolitan planning organizations) in every census region of the U.S. and 10 technology companies were interviewed.

The results show that the top curb management concerns among public officials are enforcement and communication, data collection and management, and interagency coordination. Interviewees reported success with policies such as allocating zones for passenger pick-ups and drop-offs, incentives for off-peak delivery, and requiring data sharing in exchange for reservable or additional curb spaces. Technology company representatives discussed new tools and technologies for curb management, including smart parking reservation systems, occupancy sensors and cameras, and automated enforcement. Both public and private sector staff expressed a desire for citywide policy goals around curb management, more consistent curb regulations across jurisdictions, and a common data standard for encoding curb information.

Authors: Caleb DiehlDr. Andisheh RanjbariDr. Anne Goodchild

Recommended Citation:
Diehl, C., Ranjbari, A., & Goodchild, A. (2021). Curbspace Management Challenges and Opportunities from Public and Private Sector Perspectives. Transportation Research Record. https://doi.org/10.1177/03611981211027156

Paper

Options for Benchmarking Performance Improvements Achieved from Construction of Freight Mobility Projects

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URL: https://secure.engr.oregonstate.edu/wiki/transportation/uploads/ODOT-Multimodal/Mccormack2005.pdf

Publication: Washington State Transportation Center (TRAC)

Publication Date: 2006

Summary:

This report documents the development of data collection methodologies that can be used to cost effectively measure truck movements along specific roadway corridors selected by transportation agencies in Washington State. The intent of this study was to design and test methodologies that could be used to measure the performance of freight mobility roadway improvement projects against benchmarks, or selected standards, that would be used both as part of the project selection process and to report on speed and volume improvements that resulted from completed freight mobility projects.

One technology tested was Commercial Vehicle Information System and Networks (CVISN) electronic truck transponders, which are mounted on the windshields of approximately 20,000 trucks in Washington. By using software to link the transponder reads from sites anywhere in the state, the transponder-equipped trucks could become a travel-time probe fleet. The second technology tested involved global positioning systems (GPS) placed in volunteer trucks to collect specific truck movement data at 5-second intervals. With GPS data it was possible to understand when and where the monitored trucks experienced congestion and to generate useful performance statistics.

The study found that both data collection technologies could be useful; however, the key to both technologies is whether enough instrumented vehicles pass over the roadways for which data are required. This basic condition affects whether the technologies will be effective at collecting the data required for any given benchmark project. The report also recommends the traffic data that should be collected for a benchmark program and the potential costs of using either data collection technology.

Authors: Dr. Ed McCormack, Mark Hallenbeck

Recommended Citation:
McCormack, E. D., & Hallenbeck, M. E. (2005). Options for Benchmarking Performance Improvements Achieved from Construction of Freight Mobility Projects. (No. WA-RD 607.1). Washington State Department of Transportation.

Paper

A Mobile Application for Collecting Task Time Data for Value Stream Mapping of the Final 50 Feet of Urban Goods Delivery Processes

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URL: https://doi.org/10.1177%2F1541931218621410

Publication: Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting

Volume: 62

Pages: 1808-1812

Publication Date: 2018

Summary:

Delivery options have become very diverse with online shoppers demanding faster delivery options (e.g, 2-day delivery, same day delivery options) and more personalized services. For this reason, transportation planners, retailers, and delivery companies are seeking ways to better understand how best to deliver goods and services in urban areas while minimizing disruption to traffic, parking, and building operations. This includes understanding vertical and horizontal goods movements within urban areas.

The goal of this project is to capture the delivery processes within urban buildings in order to minimize these disruptions. This is achieved using a systems approach to understanding the flow of activities and workers as they deliver goods within urban buildings. A mobile application was designed to collect the start and stop times for each task within the delivery process for 31 carriers as they deliver goods within a 62-story office building.

The process flow map helped identify bottlenecks and areas for improvements in the final segment of the delivery operations: the final 50 feet. It also highlighted consistent tasks conducted by all carriers as well as differences with given carrier type. This information is useful to help decision-makers plan appropriately for the design of future cities that encompass a variety of delivery processes.

Authors: Haena KimDr. Anne Goodchild, Linda Ng Boyle

Recommended Citation:
Kim, Haena, Linda Ng Boyle, and Anne Goodchild. (2018) "A Mobile Application for Collecting Task Time Data for Value Stream Mapping of the Final 50 Feet of Urban Goods Delivery Processes." In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 62(1), 1808–1812. https://doi.org/10.1177/1541931218621410

Paper

Urban Form and Last-Mile Goods Movement: Factors Affecting Vehicle Miles Travelled and Emissions

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URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2016.09.015

Publication: Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment

Volume: 61 (A)

Pages: 217-229

Publication Date: 2018

Summary:

There are established relationships between urban form and passenger travel, but less is known about urban form and goods movement. The work presented in this paper evaluates how the design of a delivery service and the urban form in which it operates affects its performance, as measured by vehicle miles traveled, CO2, NOx, and PM10 emissions.

This work compares simulated amounts of VMT, CO2, NOx, and PM10 generated by last-mile travel in several different development patterns and in many different goods movement structures, including various warehouse locations. Last-mile travel includes personal travel or delivery vehicles delivering goods to customers. Regression models for each goods movement scheme and models that compare sets of goods movement schemes were developed. The most influential variables in all models were measures of roadway density and proximity of a service area to the regional warehouse.

These efforts will support urban planning for goods movement, inform policies designed to mitigate the impacts of goods movement vehicles, and provide insights into achieving sustainability targets, especially as online shopping and goods delivery become more prevalent.

Authors: Dr. Anne Goodchild, Erica Wygonik

Recommended Citation:
Wygonik, Erica and Anne Goodchild. (2018) Urban Form and Last-Mile Goods Movement: Factors Affecting Vehicle Miles Travelled and Emissions. Transportation Research. Part D, Transport and Environment, 61, 217–229. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2016.09.015

Paper

Truck Travel Time Reliability and Prediction in a Port Drayage Network

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URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1057/mel.2011.24

Publication: Maritime Economics & Logistics

Volume: 13 (4)

Pages: 387-418

Publication Date: 2011

Summary:

This article will explore the reliability of the port drayage network. Port drayage is an important component of the marine intermodal system and affects the efficiency of the intermodal supply chain. Sharing and utilizing drayage truck arrival information could improve both port drayage and port operational efficiency. In this article two reliability measures are used to evaluate how the travel time reliability changes with trip origins and across drayage networks. The truck routing choices between Origin-Destination (OD) pairs are examined. A simple method is proposed to predict the 95 percent confidence interval of travel time between any OD pair and is validated with global positioning system (GPS) data. The results presented in this article demonstrate that the proposed travel time prediction method is sufficient for predicting truck arrival time windows at the terminal and can be translated into truck arrival group information.

Authors: Dr. Anne Goodchild, Wenjuan Zhao

Recommended Citation:
Zhao, Wenjuan, and Anne V. Goodchild. "Truck travel time reliability and prediction in a port drayage network." Maritime Economics & Logistics 13, no. 4 (2011): 387-418.

Paper

Processing Commercial GPS Data to Develop Web-Based Truck Performance Measure Program

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URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3141/2246-12

Publication: Transportation Research Record

Volume: 2011

Pages: 92–100

Publication Date: 2011

Summary:

Although trucks move larger volumes of goods than other modes of transportation, public agencies know little about their travel patterns and how the roadway network performs for trucks. Trucking companies use data from the Global Positioning System (GPS) provided by commercial vendors to dispatch and track their equipment. This research collected GPS data from approximately 2,500 trucks in the Puget Sound, Washington, region and evaluated the feasibility of processing these data to support a statewide network performance measures program. The program monitors truck travel time and system reliability and will guide freight investment decisions by public agencies. While other studies have used a limited number of project-specific GPS devices to collect frequent location readings, which permit a fine-grained analysis of specific roadway segments, this study used data that involved less frequent readings but that were collected from a larger number of trucks for more than a year. Automated processing was used to clean and format the data, which encompassed millions of data points. Because a performance measurement program ultimately monitored trips generated by trucks as they travel between origins and destinations, an algorithm was developed to extract this information and geocode each truck’s location to the roadway network and to traffic analysis zones. Measures were developed to quantify truck travel characteristics and performance between zones. To simplify the process and provide a better communications platform for the analysis, the researchers developed a Google Maps-based online system to compute the measures and show the trucks’ routes graphically.

Authors: Dr. Ed McCormack, Xiaolei Ma, Yinhai Wang

Recommended Citation:
Ma, Xiaolei, Edward D. McCormack, and Yinhai Wang. "Processing commercial global positioning system data to develop a web-based truck performance measures program." Transportation Research Record 2246, no. 1 (2011): 92-100.

Paper

A Description of Commercial Cross Border Trips in the Cascade Gateway and Trade Corridor

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.3328/TL.2009.01.03.213-225

Publication: Transportation Letters: The International Journal of Transportation Research

Volume: 1(3)

Pages: 213-225

Publication Date: 2009

Summary:

This paper describes commercial vehicle delay, transportation patterns and the commodity profile at the Western Cascade Gateway, the main border crossing between Southwest British Columbia, Canada, and Northwestern Washington, United States. Using five data sources for comparison—a probe vehicle border crossing time data set, a detailed border operations survey data set, loop detector volume counts, manifest sampling, and data from the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the transportation, trade, and delay patterns can be synthesized to provide a more complete description of regional freight transportation. This context can be used to consider the impact delay has on regional supply chains, and in developing appropriate freight transportation policy solutions for the border.

Authors: Dr. Anne Goodchild, Susan Albrecht, Li Leung

Recommended Citation:
Goodchild, Anne & Albrecht, Susan & Leung, Li. (2009). A description of commercial cross border trips in the Cascade Gateway and trade corridor. Transportation Letters: The International Journal of Transportation Research. 1. 213-225. 10.3328/TL.2009.01.03.213-225.