Blog

What is Microfreight? Downsizing Delivery for a Multimodal and Sustainable Future

URL: https://www.goodsmovement2030.com/post/microfreight-downsizing-delivery-for-a-multimodal-and-sustainable-future

Publication: Goods Movement 2030: An Urban Freight Blog

Publication Date: 2023

Summary:

“Why deliver two-pound burritos in two-ton cars?”

That’s the question posed by sidewalk delivery robot company Serve, which is delivering food in places like Los Angeles. Sure, using something other than a car for items like a burrito makes sense. But what about a sofa? Urban delivery is all about right-sizing, context, and connecting logically and efficiently to the broader delivery network.

At the Urban Freight Lab (UFL), we talk about things like sidewalk delivery robots and e-bikes as microfreight. Microfreight is about moving goods using smaller, more sustainable modes where possible. Think micromobility, but for moving goods, not people, in the last mile of delivery.

Microfreight was one of the four topics UFL members voted to explore as part of the Urban Freight in 2030 Project. In the right city context, using microfreight can be both economical for freight businesses and more sustainable in terms of decarbonization and city dweller quality of life. We intentionally chose to hold the UFL spring meeting on microfreight in New York City, a city on the leading edge of the multimodal goods movement. The city’s perch on that leading edge makes sense, as the densest city in the U.S.; a city with sky-high delivery demand coming from people living in sky-high towers; and a city government working to proactively manage that reality. To be sure, NYC is one of a kind when it comes to dense, vertical living. Because of this density and intense interaction between modes, the Big Apple is an important place to watch — and a great place for us to share learning, expertise, and ideas.

And when we watched the Midtown Manhattan streets during that UFL meeting, we saw throngs of people on e-bikes and cargo bikes making food and ecommerce deliveries. But microfreight is about much more than just bikes. It includes personal delivery devices (PDDs) and drones. It even includes walking, an element that permeates nearly every last-mile delivery segment, especially the final 50 feet of a trip. Yet walking is something normally talked about for moving people, much less so for moving goods. To be sure, we saw plenty of deliveries being made on foot while in NYC, too!

Here’s a rundown of what we consider to be microfreight.

Authors: Urban Freight Lab

Recommended Citation:
"What is Microfreight? Downsizing Delivery for a Multimodal and Sustainable Future." Goods Movement 2030 (blog). Urban Freight Lab, June 19, 2023. https://www.goodsmovement2030.com/post/microfreight-downsizing-delivery-for-a-multimodal-and-sustainable-future.

Blog

Goods Movement 2030: What Have We Done and What is Next?

URL: https://www.goodsmovement2030.com/post/goods-movement-2030-so-what-have-we-done-here-and-whats-next

Publication: Goods Movement 2030: An Urban Freight Blog

Publication Date: 2023

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. And they identified six priorities around which we hope to see improved outcomes for 2030 (Reducing CO2 Emissions, Reducing Congestion, Reducing Roadway Fatalities, Increasing and Improving Protected Spaces for Vulnerable Users, Making Transparent the Cost of Delivery, and Improving Equity).

From myriad lively discussions, debates, and expert-led learning over the last 18 months, this much is clear: Each of the four topics we’ve explored together cries out for deep and broad collaboration between the public and private sectors if we’re going to move the needle on our consensus priorities.

And the good news? Our members have already shown that they’re willing and able to approach that needed collaboration with curious minds and radical transparency (not to mention their demonstrated commitment to innovating and having tough conversations.) All of this bodes well for both the present — and the future we’ve all been working to imagine and shape.

While all six priorities surfaced throughout this project, it’s decarbonization that came up in virtually every discussion on every topic. On equity, we had to grapple early on with what that even means in urban freight.

This blog presents a Cliffs Notes recap of big-picture project takeaways.

Authors: Urban Freight Lab

Recommended Citation:
“Goods Movement 2030: What Have We Done and What Is Next?” Goods Movement 2030 (blog). Urban Freight Lab, October 24, 2023. https://www.goodsmovement2030.com/post/goods-movement-2030-so-what-have-we-done-here-and-whats-next.

Biking for Goods: A Case Study on the Seattle Pedaling Relief Project

1. Introduction
One of the disruptions brought by the COVID-19 pandemic was the reduction of in-store shopping, and the consequent increase in online shopping and home deliveries. However, not everyone had equal access to online shopping and home-delivery services. Customers relying on food banks were forced to shop in-store even during the pandemic. In 2020, the Cascade Bicycle Club started the Pedaling Relief Project (PRP) – a not-for-profit home delivery service run by volunteers using bikes to pick up food at food banks and deliver to food bank customers, among other services.

The Urban Freight Lab collaborates with the Cascade Bicycle Club (CBC) to study and improve PRP operations. For this work, students in Prof. Anne Goodchild’s Transportation Engineering course on Transportation Logistics (CET 587) are undertaking a case study: to analyze the transport and logistics system of the Pedaling Relief Project and provide recommendations for how to improve operations.

2. Background
2.1. Food rescue at a glance
An estimated 94,500 tons of food from Seattle business establishments end up in compost and landfills each year, while many members of our community remain food insecure. The process of food rescuing consists of the gleaning of edible food from business establishments – called donor businesses such as grocery stores, restaurants, and commissary kitchens – that otherwise would enter the waste stream and be re-distributed to local food programs. Hunger relief agencies, also referred to as food banks, are non-profit organizations that collect rescued food, either directly from businesses or through food rescue distributors (such as Food Lifeline or Northeast Harvest) and re-distribute it to the community through meal programs, walk-ins, and pop-up food pantries, student backpack programs, among others.

Read more about the Seattle food rescue system in SCTL’s report (2020) on “Improving Food Rescue in Seattle: What Can Be Learned from a Supply Chain View?”

2.2. Pedaling Relief Project
In 2020 the Cascade Bicycle Club started the Pedaling Relief Project (PRP), a volunteer-based program that collaborates with local food banks to offer three main types of services — (1) grocery delivery, (2) food rescue, (3) little free pantry restocking — coordinating a network of volunteers on bikes.

Grocery delivery (GD) service consists of picking up grocery bags from food banks and performing delivery routes, distributing food to food bank customers that asked for home delivery services.
Food rescue (FR) services support the existing distributors by picking up food at business establishments and carrying rescued food to local food banks.
Little free pantries restocking (LFPR) services consist of picking up food at local food banks and carrying it to neighborhood micro pantries –containers placed on local streets and open to everyone to store food from donors to whoever needs it. Learn more about the Little free pantries project on thelittlefreepantries.org.

Volunteers use their own bikes, with some cargo carry capacity, or can request a bike trailer or cargo bike from the Cascade Bicycle Club.

2.3. Cargo Bikes
Cargo bikes are two/three/four-wheel bikes with some cargo-carrying capacity. They are increasingly used as an alternative mode to trucks and vans to transport goods in urban areas. Cargo bikes are often supported by an electric motor that assists the driver when pedaling. Compared to internal combustion engine vehicles, cargo bikes do not produce tailpipe emissions and they consume less energy than electric vans (Verlinghieri et al., 2021). They also offer several operational advantages: they are more agile in navigating urban road traffic, they can use alternative road infrastructure such as bike lanes and sidewalks to drive and park, they can park closer to their delivery destination, reducing walking distances and parking dwell times (Dalla Chiara et al., 2020).

3. Project instructions

The CBC provided access to anonymous data on the PRP operations for the exclusive use of the 2022 CET 587 course student cohort final projects. Students are asked to individually perform empirical research using the provided data and/or self-collected data on the PRP operations with the following objectives:

Empirically analyze and describe PRP operations.
Provide recommendations on what actions can be taken to improve PRP operations.

Projects will meet the following two requirements:

Use the provided data and/or self-collected and/or publicly sourced data to perform empirical analysis
Provide justified and concrete recommendations on how to improve the PRP.
Complete deliverables 1 and 2 (see below), which consist of 2 presentations, a project proposal, and a final project report.

Project progress timeline and deliverables:

Weeks	Progress & Deliverables
1-2	Become familiar with R language programming; PRP background and data
3	CBC gives a guest lecture about PRP
4-5	Project proposal; 2-minute lightning talk about the project proposal Deliverable 1: 1-page project proposal
6-10	Implement proposed methodology and perform research
11	Each student will give a 15-minute presentation of the main results of the project Deliverable 2: Final report

The following are potential project directions:

Analyze current routes performed by volunteers. How can they be improved? Get the work done more quickly, or with fewer bikes?
Analyze data from little free pantries restocking. Collect additional data on the use of Little Free Pantries by manual observations or by installing sensors in a few of them. Can we model demand and supply for food donations?
Collect and analyze GPS data by signing up and performing some of the PRP routes yourself. What type of infrastructure do cargo bikes need and how does street and curb use behavior differ between cargo bikes and vans? What can the city do to better support this type of activity?
Analyze volunteers’ behaviors data. Is it possible to model the supply of volunteers? Can you simulate different scenarios of volunteer supply?
Develop your own direction with approval.

Students will be provided with a base dataset on PRP operations. Students are encouraged to use other datasets self-collected or from public data sources (e.g. check out the SDOT Open Data Portal), to share ideas in class and among each other, to use as much as possible class time, guest lectures and office hours to ask questions and share ideas.

1: 1-page project proposal and 2-minute lightning talk describing motivation, project objective(s) and research question(s), proposed methodology (data to use/collect, methods to implement), and expected results.

2: Final report and 10-minute presentation describing data used, including sample size and sample statistics, how data collection was performed, empirical analysis performed using data and results from the analysis, and conclusions, key findings, and key recommendations.

Report

Mapping the Challenges to Sustainable Urban Freight

Download PDF (2.29 MB)

Publication Date: 2022

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. Companies report being motivated by cost reduction, efficiency, branding and customer loyalty, and corporate responsibility.

For its part, Amazon in 2019 pledged to become a net-zero carbon business by 2040. In the wake of that pledge, Amazon financially supported this Urban Freight Lab research examining two key questions:

What is the current state of sustainable urban freight planning in the United States?
What are the challenges to achieving a sustainable urban freight system in the United States and Canada?

Because the research literature reveals that denser, more populous cities are the areas most impacted by climate change, we focused our analysis on the 58 cities representing the largest, densest, and fastest-growing cities in the U.S. found within the nation’s 25 largest, densest, and fastest-growing metro areas. Our population, growth, and density focus resulted in heavy concentration in California, Texas, and Florida and light representation in the Midwest.

Within those 58 cities, we reviewed 243 city planning documents related to transportation and conducted 25 interviews with public and private stakeholders. We intentionally sought out both the public and private sectors because actors in each are setting carbon-reduction goals and drafting plans and taking actions to address climate change in the urban freight space.

In our research, we found that:

The overwhelming majority of cities currently have no plans to support sustainable urban freight. As of today, ten percent of the cities considered in this research have taken meaningful steps towards decarbonizing the sector.
Supply chains are complex and the focus on urban supply chain sustainability is relatively new. This reality helps explain the myriad challenges to moving toward a sustainable urban freight system.
For city governments, those challenges include a need to adapt existing tools and policy levers or create new ones, as well as a lack of resources and leadership to make an impact in the industry.
For companies, those challenges include concerns about the time, cost, technology, and labor complexity such moves could require.

“Sustainability” can mean many things. In this research, we define sustainable urban freight as that which reduces carbon dioxide emissions, with their elimination—which we refer to as decarbonization—as the ultimate end goal. This definition represents just one environmental impact of urban freight and does not include, for example, noise pollution, NOx or SOx emissions, black carbon, or particulate matter.

We define urban freight as last-mile delivery within cities, including parcel deliveries made by companies like Amazon and UPS and wholesale deliveries made by companies like Costco and Pepsi. We do not include regional or drayage/port freight as those merely transit through cities and face distinct sustainability barriers.

Authors: Urban Freight Lab

Recommended Citation:
Urban Freight Lab (2022). Mapping the Challenges to Sustainable Urban Freight.

Technical Report

Year Two Progress Report: Technology Integration to Gain Commercial Efficiency for the Urban Goods Delivery System, Meet Future Demand for City Passenger and Delivery Load/Unload Spaces, and Reduce Energy Consumption

Download PDF (2.46 MB)

Publication: U.S. Department of Energy

Publication Date: 2021

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 decisions
Reduce parcel truck dwell time in pilot test areas in Seattle and Bellevue, Washington, by approximately 30%, thereby increasing productivity of load/unload spaces near common carrier locker systems, and
Improve the transportation network (which includes roads, intersections, warehouses, fulfillment centers, etc.) and commercial firms’ efficiency by increasing curb occupancy rates to roughly 80%, and alley space occupancy rates from 46% to 60% during peak hours, and increasing private loading bay occupancy rates in the afternoon peak times, in the pilot test area.

The project team has designed a 3-year plan to achieve the objectives of this project.

In Year 1, the team developed integrated technologies and finalized the pilot test parameters. This involved finalizing the plan for placing sensory devices and common parcel locker systems on public and private property; issuing the request for proposals; selecting vendors; and gaining approvals necessary to execute the plan. The team also developed techniques to preprocess the data streams from the sensor devices, and began to design the prototype smart phone parking app to display real-time load/unload space availability, as well as the truck load/unload space behavior model.

In Year 2, the team executed the implementation plan:

oversaw installation of the in-road sensors, and collecting and processing data,
managed installation, marketing and operations of three common locker systems in the pilot test area,
tested the prototype smart phone parking app with initial data stream, and
developed a truck parking behavior simulation model.

Authors: Urban Freight Lab

Recommended Citation:
Urban Freight Lab (2021). Year Two Progress Report: Technology Integration to Gain Commercial Efficiency for the Urban Goods Delivery System.