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Article

The Role of Walking in Last-Mile Urban Deliveries

 
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Publication: Transportation
Publication Date: 2025
Summary:

Most of a delivery driver’s time is spent outside the vehicle, walking the last 50 feet to reach the delivery customers while the vehicle is stationary. However, little is known about the walking component of delivery routes, while most models and algorithms used for scheduling and planning urban freight vehicles focus solely on the driving component. This study fills this research gap by providing an empirical analysis of the role of walking in last-mile deliveries. The study aims to empirically quantify delivery drivers’ walking distances and shed light on the interrelation between walking and the overall efficiency and sustainability of delivery routes. Two data samples were obtained that recorded more than 1,800 real deliveries performed by a parcel carrier and a beverage carrier in Seattle, WA. Data on both vehicle routes and drivers’ walking sub-routes were obtained and analyzed. Dwell time regression analyses and simulations were performed to understand the impact of walking on last-mile routes. The results highlighted the importance of walking across different types of deliveries. Both carriers either walked longer distances to find better parking or to serve multiple delivery customers from a single stop. The parcel carrier also showed large economies of scale in performing multiple deliveries per stop. An increase in willingness to walk showed a general reduction in the number of stops per route and in total vehicle miles traveled. The paper concludes with a discussion on the importance of walking in scheduling and planning for delivery vehicles in urban areas.

Recommended Citation:
Dalla Chiara, G., Goodchild, A. The role of walking in last-mile urban deliveries. Transportation (2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-025-10633-6.

Seattle Center City Alley Infrastructure Inventory and Occupancy Study 2018 (Task Order 4)

The Urban Freight Lab conducted an alley inventory and truck load/unload occupancy study for the City of Seattle. Researchers collected data identifying the locations and infrastructure characteristics of alleys within Seattle’s One Center City planning area, which includes the downtown, uptown, South Lake Union, Capitol Hill, and First Hill urban centers. The resulting alley database includes GIS coordinates for both ends of each alley, geometric and traffic attributes, and photos. Researchers also observed all truck load/unload activity in selected alleys to determine minutes vacant and minutes occupied by trucks, vans, passenger vehicles, and cargo bikes. The researchers then developed alley management recommendations to promote safe, sustainable, and efficient goods delivery and pick-up.

Key Findings

The first key finding of this study is that more than 90% of Center City alleys are only one-lane wide. This surprising fact creates an upper limit on alley parking capacity, as each alley can functionally hold only one or two vehicles at a time. Because there is no room to pass by, when a truck, van, or car parks it blocks all other vehicles from using the alley. When commercial vehicle drivers see that an alley is blocked they will not enter it, as their only way out would be to back up into street traffic. Seattle Municipal code prohibits this, as well as backing up into an alley, for safety reasons.

When informed by the second key finding‚ 68% of vehicles in the alley occupancy study parked there for 15 minutes or less‚ it is clear that moving vehicles through alleys in short time increments is the only reasonable path to increase productivity. As one parked vehicle operationally blocks the entire alley, the goal of new alley policies and strategies should be to reduce the amount of time alleys are blocked to additional users.

The study surfaces four additional key findings:

  1. 87% of all vehicles in the 7 alleys studied parked for 30 minutes or less. Given the imperative to move alley traffic quickly, vehicles that need more parking time must be moved out of the alleys and onto the curb where they don’t block others.
  2. 15% of alleys’ pavement condition is so poor that delivery workers can’t pass through with loaded hand carts. Although trucks can drive over fairly uneven pavement without difficulty, it is not the case for delivery people walking with fully loaded handcarts. The alley pavement rating was done with a qualitative visual inspection to identify obvious problems; more detailed measurements would be needed to fully assess conditions.
  3. 73% of Center City area alleys contain entrances to passenger parking facilities. Placing garage entrances in alleys has been a city policy goal for years. But it increases the frequency of cars in alleys and adds demands on alley use. Understanding why cars are queuing for passenger garages located off alleys, and providing incentives and disincentives to reduce that, would help make alleys more productive.
  4. Alleys are vacant about half of the time during the business day. While at first blush this suggests ample capacity, the fact that an alley can only hold one-to-two parked trucks at a time means alleys are limited operationally and therefore are not a viable alternative to replace the use of curb CVLZs on city streets.

These findings indicate that, due to the fixed alley width constraint, load/unload space inside Seattle’s existing Center City area alleys is insufficient to meet additional future demand.

Paper

Data Stories from Urban Loading Bays

 
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Publication: European Transport Research Review
Volume: 9
Publication Date: 2017
Summary:

Freight vehicle parking facilities at large urban freight traffic generators, such as urban retail malls, are often characterized by a high volume of vehicle arrivals and a poor parking supply infrastructure. Recurrent congestion of freight parking facilities generates environmental (e.g. pollution), economic (e.g. delays in deliveries), and freight and social (e.g. traffic) negative externalities. Solutions aimed at either improving or better managing the existing parking infrastructure rely heavily on data and data-driven models to predict their impact and guide their implementation. In the current work, we provide a quantitative study of the parking supply and freight vehicle drivers’ parking behavior at urban retail malls.

We use as case studies two typical urban retail malls located in Singapore, and collect detailed data on freight vehicles delivering or picking up goods at these malls. Insights from this data collection effort are relayed as data stories. We first describe the parking facility at a mall as a queueing system, where freight vehicles are the agents and their decisions are the parking location choice and the parking duration.

Using the data collected, we analyze (i) the arrival rates of vehicles at the observed malls, (ii) the empirical distribution of parking durations at the loading bays, (iii) the factors that influence the parking duration, (iv) the empirical distribution of waiting times spent by freight vehicle queueing to access the loading bay, and (v) the driver parking location choices and how this choice is influenced by system congestion.

This characterization of freight driver behavior and parking facility system performance enables one to understand current challenges, and begin to explore the feasibility of freight parking and loading bay management solutions.

Authors: Dr. Giacomo Dalla Chiara, Lynette Cheah
Recommended Citation:
Dalla Chiara, G., Cheah, L. Data stories from urban loading bays. Eur. Transp. Res. Rev. 9, 50 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12544-017-0267-3