Publications

Summary:
As one of the nation’s first zero-emissions last-mile delivery pilots, the Seattle Neighborhood Delivery Hub served as a testbed for innovative sustainable urban logistics strategies on the ground in Seattle’s dense Uptown neighborhood.

Summary:
This study aims to identify factors correlated with dwell time for commercial vehicles (the time that delivery workers spend performing out-of-vehicle activities while parked). While restricting vehicle dwell time is widely used to manage commercial vehicle parking behavior, there is insufficient data to help assess the effectiveness of these restrictions, which makes it difficult for policymakers to account for the complexity of commercial vehicle parking behavior.

Summary:
Efforts to regulate the curb also suffer from a lack of publicly accessible data on both the demand and supply of curb space. Cities often do not have the technical expertise to develop a curb data collection and data-sharing strategy. In addition, the private individuals and companies that generate most of the curb-use data often withhold them from public use to protect proprietary information and personal user data. However, new uses of data sources, such as the Global Positioning System...

Summary:
This study is sponsored by Amazon, Bellevue Transportation department, Challenge Seattle, King County Metro, Seattle Department of Transportation, Sound Transit, and Uber, with support from the Mobility Innovation Center at UW CoMotion. Population and extended economic growth in many Seattle neighborhoods are driving increased demand for private car travel along with transportation services such as ridehailing and on-demand delivery.

Summary:
A central theme of U.S. transportation planning policies is to reduce single-occupancy vehicle (SOV) trips and promote transit and non-motorized transportation by coordinating land-use planning and transportation demand management (TDM) programs. Cities often implement TDM programs by intervening with new development during the municipal permit review process.

Summary:
Mobility services including carsharing and transportation network company (TNC) services have been growing rapidly in North America and around the world. Measuring the effects of these services on traveler behavior is challenging because the results of any such analysis are sensitive to how (1) outcomes are measured and (2) counterfactuals are constructed.

Summary:
In recent years, e-commerce has dramatically increased deliveries to residential areas. The rise in delivery vehicle activity creates externalities for the transportation system, including congestion, competition for parking space, and emissions. Common carrier lockers have emerged as a way to manage these effects by consolidating deliveries, but they remain largely untested in the United States.

Summary:
Bike facilities like bike lanes, bike trails, and neighborhood greenways have been the backbone of Seattle’s bike planning policy with the goal of promoting active transportation, reducing car dependence, improving social equity, and eliminating bike accidents.

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.