Publications

Summary:
Parking cruising is a well-known phenomenon in passenger transportation, and a significant source of congestion and pollution in urban areas. While urban commercial vehicles are known to travel longer distances and to stop more frequently than passenger vehicles, little is known about their parking cruising behavior, nor how parking infrastructure affects such behavior.

Summary:
Inhabited islands are susceptible to natural hazards, such as wildfires. To avoid disasters, preventative measures and guidelines need to be in place to strengthen community resilience. If these fail, evacuation is often the only choice. However, island evacuation is a vastly understudied problem in both research and practice, particularly for islands without permanent road connections to the mainland that require marine evacuation.

Summary:
Green loading zones (GLZs) are curb spaces dedicated to the use of electric or alternative fuel (“green”) delivery vehicles. Some US cities have begun piloting GLZs to incentivize companies to purchase and operate more green vehicles. However, there are several questions to be answered prior to a GLZ implementation, including siting, potential users, and their willing to pay.

Summary:
This three-year project supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Vehicle Technologies Office has the potential to radically improve the urban freight system in ways that help both the public and private sectors.

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.

Summary:
At the time we are writing this article, hundreds of thousands of delivery vehicles are getting ready to hit the road and travel across U.S. cities to meet the highest peak of demand for ecommerce deliveries during Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and the Christmas holiday season. This mammoth fleet will not only add vehicle miles traveled through urban centers but also increase parking congestion, battling with other vehicles for available curb space.

Summary:
The last mile of delivery is undergoing major changes, experiencing new demand and new challenges. The rise in urban deliveries amid the societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically affected urban logistics. The level of understanding is increasing as cities and companies pilot strategies that pave the way for efficient urban freight practices.

Summary:
With the dramatic and recent growth in demand for curbside pick-up and drop-off by ride-hailing services, as well as online shopping and associated deliveries, balancing the needs of roadway users is increasingly critical. Local governments lack tools to evaluate the impacts of curb management strategies that prioritize different users’ needs.

Summary:
Until recently, urban transport authorities often overlooked freight, concentrating their attention on the movement of people. Even when motivated to tackle urban freight, many city authorities find it difficult to mobilize their own resources, and address the complex set of differing views of a large variety of stakeholders. Historically, the role of city authorities, or local authorities within cities, has been confined largely to one of regulation as opposed to collaborative planning.

Summary:
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, online and in-store shopping behaviors changed significantly. As the pandemic subsides, key questions are why those changes happened, whether they are expected to stay, and, if so, to what extent. We answered those questions by analyzing a quasi-longitudinal survey dataset of the Puget Sound residents (Washington, U.S.).

Summary:
The distribution of goods and services in North American cities has conventionally relied on diesel-powered internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. Recent developments in electromobility have provided an opportunity to reduce some of the negative externalities generated by urban logistics systems. Cargo e-bikes — electric cycles specially designed for cargo transportation — represent an alternative environmentally friendly and safer mode for delivering goods and services in urban areas.

Summary:
A year and a half ago, our members decided to dig into four topics for the Goods Movement 2030 project (Electrification, Digital Transformation, Planning Streets for People and Goods, and Microfreight). They all — public and private sector alike — saw these areas as transformative.

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.

Summary:
The rapid growth in e-commerce activities and the constant specialization of industries have aroused an unparalleled demand for trucking in urban areas, leading to growing concern over its interference to the transportation system.

Summary:
It becomes easier to understand the barriers to scaling up cargo bikes for last-mile delivery when you hear Mark Chiusano, Owner/CEO of Cornucopia Logistics and affiliates, talk about the complexity of operations in New York City. Cornucopia works with Amazon (both companies are Urban Freight Lab members) to run a fleet of more than 100 cargo bikes making thousands of weekly deliveries for Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods locations in Manhattan.