Publications

Summary:
As ecommerce and urban deliveries spike, cities grapple with managing urban freight more actively. To manage urban deliveries effectively, city planners and policy makers need to better understand driver behaviors and the challenges they experience in making deliveries. In this study, we collected data on commercial vehicle (CV) driver behaviors by performing ridealongs with various logistics carriers.

Summary:
The demand for home deliveries has seen a drastic increase, especially in cities, putting urban freight systems under pressure. As more people move to urban areas and change consumer behaviors to shop online, busy delivery operations cause externalities such as congestion and air pollution. Micro-consolidation implementations and their possible pairing with soft transportation modes offer practical, economic, environmental, and cultural benefits.

Summary:
Urban freight distribution has confronted several challenges, including negative environmental, social, and economic impacts. Many city logistics initiatives that use the concept of Urban Consolidation Centers (UCCs) have failed. The failure of many UCCs does not mean that the idea of additional terminals or microhubs should be rejected. There is limited knowledge about the advantages and disadvantages of using microhubs, requiring further exploration of this concept.

Summary:
Competition throughout the urban freight supply chain is steadily growing. Companies need to devise innovative methods for the transportation of goods from raw materials all the way to the final consumer. From concept to practice, it can be challenging to identify affordable solutions.

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:
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:
As e-commerce and urban deliveries spike, cities grapple with managing urban freight more actively. To manage urban deliveries effectively, city planners and policy makers need to better understand driver behaviors and the challenges they experience in making deliveries. In this study, we collected data on commercial vehicle (CV) driver behaviors by performing ridealongs with various logistics carriers.

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:
The demand for goods and services is rapidly increasing in cities, in part due to the rise in online shopping and more varied delivery options. Cities around the world are experiencing an influx of goods pickup and delivery activities. The movement of goods within urban areas can be very constraining with high levels of congestion and insufficient curb spaces.

Summary:
The objectives of this project are to develop and implement a technology solution to support research, development, and demonstration of data processing techniques, models, simulations, a smart phone application, and a visual-confirmation system to: Reduce delivery vehicle parking seeking behavior by approximately 20% in the pilot test area, by returning current and predicted load/unload space occupancy information to users on a web-based and/or mobile platform, to inform real-time parking decis…

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 study performed an empirical analysis to evaluate the implementation of a cargo e-bike delivery system pilot tested by the United Parcel Service, Inc. (UPS) in Seattle, Washington. During the pilot, a cargo e-bike with a removable cargo container was used to perform last-mile deliveries in downtown Seattle. Cargo containers were pre-loaded daily at the UPS Seattle depot and loaded onto a trailer, which was then carried to a parking lot in downtown.

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 affect such behavior.

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.