Publications

Summary:
As urbanized populations and concentrations of activities increase, there is growing pressure in dense and constrained urban areas to unlock the potential of every public infrastructure element to address the increasing demand for public space. Specifically, there is a growing demand for space for parking operations related to the access to land use by people and goods.

Summary:
As awareness of the vulnerability of isolated regions to natural disasters grows, the demand for efficient evacuation plans is increasing. However, isolated areas, such as islands, often have characteristics that make conventional methods, such as evacuation by private vehicle, impractical to infeasible. Mathematical models are conventional tools for evacuation planning.

Summary:
While freight transportation is a necessary activity to sustain cities’ social and economic life—enabling the movement and deployment of goods and services in urbanized areas—it also accounts for a significant portion of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. The urban freight ecosystem is a complex network of agents, both public and private.

Summary:
(This project is part of the Urban Freight Lab’s Technical Assistance Program, where UFL contributes to the project by providing 1:1 match funds in terms of staff and/or research assistants to complete project tasks.) Green Loading Zones (GLZs) are curb spaces dedicated to the use of electric or alternative fuel (“green”) delivery vehicles. Some U.S. cities have begun piloting GLZs to incentivize companies to purchase and operate more green vehicles.

Summary:
In an effort to reduce emissions from last-mile deliveries and incentivize green vehicle adoption, The New York City Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) is seeking to implement a Green Loading Zone (GLZ) pilot program. A Green Loading Zone is curb space designated for the sole use of “green” vehicles, which could include electric and alternative fuel vehicles as well as other zero-emission delivery modes like electric-assist cargo bikes.

Summary:
Just as there has been a push for more climate-friendly passenger travel in recent years, that same push is building for freight travel. At the same time ecommerce is booming and goods delivery in cities is rising, sustainability has become a policy focus for city governments and a corporate priority for companies. Why? Cities report being motivated to be responsive to residents, businesses, and the goals of elected leaders.

Summary:
A growing body of research looks specifically at freight vehicle parking choices for purposes of deliveries to street retail, and choice impacts on travel time/uncertainty, congestion, and emissions. However, little attention was given to large urban freight traffic generators, e.g., shopping malls and commercial buildings with offices and retail. These pose different challenges to manage freight vehicle parking demand, due to the limited parking options.

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:
How many Amazon packages get delivered each year? – Aya K., age 9, Illinois It’s incredibly convenient to buy something online, right from your computer or phone. Whether it’s a high-end telescope or a resupply of toothpaste, the goods appear right at your doorstep. This kind of shopping is called “e-commerce” and it’s becoming more popular each year. In the U.S., it has grown from a mere 7% of retail purchases in 2012 to 19.6% of retail and $791.7 billion...

Summary:
Moving freight is vital to our ability to live in cities and access goods — but who bears the costs of moving goods, and who benefits from the access that goods movement provides? These costs and benefits have not been borne equally. The last blog post revealed how urban freight is largely missing in discussions around transportation equity and accessibility. Freight delivers immense benefits to cities and residents.

Summary:
Is public charging a realistic option for urban freight? In Part 1, we focused our discussion on electrifying urban freight on grid capacity and installing the correct charger for the job. In this post, we continue the discussion by exploring an avenue for charging infrastructure: publicly available chargers.

Summary:
The meteoric rise in urban deliveries and the lingering societal effects of the Covid-19 pandemic are having dramatic implications for the future of business, climate, and cities. Together with our collaborators and subject matter experts from across the logistics landscape, we are creating a collective vision for the urban freight system in 2030 and we are excited to present it in a new blog.

Summary:
How can charging infrastructure spark urban freight electrification? With billions of federal dollars to be invested in building out the country’s charging network, EVs (Electric Vehicles) will soon be getting more places to juice up than ever before. The colossal infrastructure undertaking is meant to keep up with surging EV demand, projected to make up a quarter of all new car sales by 2025. For instance, meeting Seattle’s target of putting 174,000 passenger EVs on the road by 2030 will...

Summary:
What does an equitable and just freight system actually look like? We asked UFL members this question at the summer 2022 quarterly meeting. Their responses, shown in the graphic below, cover a wide range of ideas and topics. Some define equity in terms of equal access to the numerous benefits a freight system brings; others call for a reduction in freight costs — like pollution, noise, and traffic — to historically marginalized people. Members differ on who the appropriate stakeholders...

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...