Publications

Summary:
Seattle is one of the nation’s fastest-growing cities, presenting both opportunities and challenges for food waste. An estimated 94,500 tons of food from Seattle businesses end up in compost bins or landfills each year—some of it edible food that simply never got sold at restaurants, grocery stores, hospitals, schools or dining facilities. Meantime, members of our community remain food insecure. It makes sense for food to feed people rather than become waste.

Summary:
The rapid spread of COVID-19 pandemic in the U.S. spurred many state governments to take extensive actions for social distancing and issue stay-at-home orders to reduce the spread of the virus. Washington State and all other States in the PacTrans region have issued stay-at-home orders that include school closures, telecommuting, bars/restaurants closures, and group gathering bans, among others.

Summary:
As of June 2020, the novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) has infected more than eight million people worldwide. In response to the global pandemic, cities have been put under lockdown, closing non-essential businesses and banning group gatherings, limiting urban mobility, and issuing stay-at-home orders, while nations closed their borders. During these times, logistics became more important than ever in guaranteeing the uninterrupted flow of goods to city residents.

Summary:
The violation of the International Regulations for Preventing Collisions at Sea (COLREGS) is a precursor to the majority of collisions. These violations may indicate a poor safety culture within shipping or they may indicate the failure of the COLREGS to capture the modern ordinary practice of seamen. The COLREGS are a mix of rules and regulations. Regulations are a form of explicit, externally applied control; while the text of a rule is ambiguous and requires observing the system it refers...

Summary:
Urban deliveries are traditionally carried out with vans or trucks. These vehicles tend to face parking difficulties in dense urban areas, leading to traffic congestion. Smaller and nimbler vehicles by design, such as cargo-cycles, struggle to compete in distance range and carrying capacity. However, a system of cargo-cycles complemented with strategically located cargo-storing hubs can overcome some limitations of the cargo-cycles.

Summary:
There is growing pressure in cities to unlock the potential of every public infrastructure element as density and demand for urban resources increase. Despite their historical role as providing access to land uses for freight and servicing, alleys have not been studied as a resource in modern freight access planning. The authors developed a replicable data collection method to build and maintain an alley inventory and operations study focused on commercial vehicles.

Summary:
Understanding factors that drive the parking choice of commercial vehicles at delivery stops in cities can enhance logistics operations and the management of freight parking infrastructure, mitigate illegal parking, and ultimately reduce traffic congestion. In this paper, we focus on this decision-making process at large urban freight traffic generators, such as retail malls and transit terminals, that attract a large share of urban commercial vehicle traffic.

Summary:
The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) engaged the Urban Freight Lab at the Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center at the University of Washington to conduct research on the impacts of a freight and transit (FAT) lane that was implemented in January 2019 in Seattle. To improve freight mobility in the City of Seattle and realize the objectives included in the city’s Freight Master Plan (FMP), the FAT lane was opened upon the closing of the Alaskan Way Viaduct. The...

Summary:
Although road infrastructure has been designed to accommodate human drivers’ physiology and psychology for over a century, human error has always been the main cause of traffic accidents. Consequently, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) have been developed to mitigate human shortcomings. These automated functions are becoming more sophisticated allowing for Automated Driving Systems (ADS) to drive under an increasing number of road conditions.

Summary:
This paper discusses how to promote high-speed rail (HSR) freight business by solving the congestion problem. First, we define the existing operation modes in China and propose the idea of relieving congestion by reserving more carriages of HSR passenger trains for freight between cities with large potential volume or small capacity.

Summary:
This research scan revealed a lack of an established and widely accepted definition for the concept of consolidation centers or microhubs. Many recent implementations of urban freight consolidation have focused on bundling goods close to the delivery point by creating logistical platforms in the heart of urban areas. These have shared a key purpose: to avoid freight vehicles traveling into urban centers with partial loads.

Summary:
Despite significant advances in freight transport modeling in recent years, there is still lack of available tools for evaluating novel logistics solutions. We introduce the framework of SimMobility Freight, which is part of SimMobility, a multi-scale agent-based urban transportation simulation platform. SimMobility Freight is capable of simulating commodity contracts, logistics and vehicle operation planning and parking decisions in a fully-disaggregate manner.

Summary:
This Toolkit is designed to help transportation professionals and researchers gather key data needed to make the Final 50 Feet segment function as efficiently as possible, reducing both the time trucks park in load/unload spaces and the number of failed first delivery attempts.

Summary:
This report describes the Urban Freight Lab (UFL) work to map the locations of all private loading docks, loading bays, and loading areas for commercial vehicles in Seattle’s First Hill and Capitol Hill neighborhoods and document their key design and capacity features, as part of our Final 50 Feet Research Program.

Summary:
Increased use of ridehailing leads to increased pick-up and drop-off activity. This may slow traffic or cause delays as vehicles increase curb use, conduct pick-up and drop-off activity directly in the travel lane, or slow to find and connect with passengers. How should cities respond to this change in an effort to keep travel lanes operating smoothly and efficiently?