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Urban Freight Lab

Research Topic: Logistics and Supply Chain

The supply chain is the movement of raw materials and parts from the beginning of production through delivery to the consumer. Logistics is the aspect of supply chain management that plans, implements, and controls the efficient, effective forward and reverse flow and storage of goods, services, and related information between the point of origin and the point of consumption to meet customers’ requirements.

Roadblocks to Sustainable Urban Freight

While freight transportation is a necessary activity to sustain cities’ social and economic life, enabling the movement and deployment of goods and services in and between urbanized areas, it also accounts for a significant portion of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and therefore it is a major contributor to climate change. Guaranteeing an efficient and sustainable urban freight transport ecosystem is necessary for cities to survive and tackle the climate emergency.
Several stakeholders in the private and public sectors are currently taking action and drafting roadmaps to achieve such goals. However, as the urban freight ecosystem is a complex network of stakeholders, achieving such sustainability goals requires collaboration and coordination between multiple agents.
The project will collect and synthesize expert views from both the private and public sectors on what is needed to sustainably deliver the last mile and aims at identifying the roadblocks towards this goal. All types of goods and services will be considered, with the end goal of raising the entire industry’s understanding of the barriers to achieving sustainable urban freight.

Approach

Task 1: Research Scan (September-November 2020) Subtasks:

  1. identify an accepted and shared definition of sustainable urban freight;
  2. identify and classify the main agents of the urban freight system from both the private and public sectors and their main role in the last-mile ecosystem;
  3. identify and classify the main accepted strategies currently adopted towards sustainability.
The research team will also define the boundaries of the study, including the geographical region of concentration.

Task 2: Private sector expert interviews (December 2020-April 2021)

The main private sector agents identified in Task 1 will include vehicle manufacturers, retailers, carriers and more. The research team will identify and reach out to representatives of at least 15 companies. Participants will be interviewed using an open question format and will have an optional follow-up online survey. The objectives of the interviews and surveys are:
  1. listing the current strategies adopted to reach sustainable urban freight;
  2. understanding what the impacts are of other private and public sectors agents’ decisions on their sustainability strategies;
  3. identifying agents’ needs and obstacles to achieve their stated sustainable goals.

Task 3: Public sector expert interviews (December 2020-April 2021)

The research team will identify different urban typologies, classifying cities into homogeneous groups according to economic, demographic, urban form, mobility and sustainability indicators. The typologies will be used to sample cities from each identified urban typology.
The team will then reach out to representatives from the public sector agents from the sampled cities, including regulators, planners and public utility representatives, and perform a combination of online survey and online/phone interviews. At least 15 representatives from public sector agents will be contacted. The objectives of the interviews are:
  1. listing the current policies adopted by cities towards sustainable urban freight, including infrastructure investments and transport demand management;
  2. understanding what the obstacles are to achieve sustainability goals.

Task 4: Synthesizing research and identifying roadblocks (May-June 2021)

Synthesizing the work of the previous 3 tasks, and applying the research team’s own expertise, this task will identify the key obstacles to sustainable urban freight. Through a review of existing writings, discussions with experts, and their own domain expertise, the research team will identify the obstacles in the areas of transportation technology, infrastructure, and policy. This review will consider the obstacles in public sector, barriers to private business decision making, and where the two sectors need to take a collaborative approach. The results obtained in the study will be made available publicly as a white paper or submitted for scientific journal publication.

Empirical Analysis of Commercial Vehicle Dwell Times Around Freight-Attracting Urban Buildings in Downtown Seattle

 
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URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2021.02.019
Publication: Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice
Volume: 147
Pages: 320-338
Publication Date: 2021
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.

This is accomplished by using generalized linear models with data collected from five buildings that are known to include commercial vehicle activities in the downtown area of Seattle, Washington, USA. Our models showed that dwell times for buildings with concierge services tended to be shorter. Deliveries of documents also tended to have shorter dwell times than oversized supplies deliveries. Passenger vehicle deliveries had shorter dwell times than deliveries made with vehicles with roll-up doors or swing doors (e.g., vans and trucks). When there were deliveries made to multiple locations within a building, the dwell times were significantly longer than dwell times made to one location in a building. The findings from the presented models demonstrate the potential for improving future parking policies for commercial vehicles by considering data collected from different building types, delivered goods, and vehicle types.

Authors: Haena KimDr. Anne Goodchild, Linda Ng Boyle
Recommended Citation:
Kim, H., Goodchild, A., & Boyle, L. N. (2021). Empirical analysis of commercial vehicle dwell times around freight-attracting urban buildings in downtown Seattle. Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 147, 320–338. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2021.02.019
Student Thesis and Dissertations

Pacific Highway Commercial Vehicle Operations: Border Policy and Logistical Efficiency in a Regional Context (MS Thesis)

URL: https://alliance-primo.hosted.exlibrisgroup.com/permalink/f/kjtuig/CP71178543410001451
Publication Date: 2010
Summary:

Activities of commercial vehicles just prior to or just following international border crossings are not well understood. Logistical responses to border crossings are believed to increase empty miles traveled, travel times and total vehicle emissions. Analysis of observational data and surveys taken by commercial carriers at the Cascade Gateway border crossings (between Whatcom County, Washington State and Lower British Columbia) improves understanding of the manner by and extent to which the border and the associated policies and regulations impact logistics operations near the border. Findings suggest that the border creates logistical incentives for trucks to both deadhead (cross the border without carrying goods as part of a cross-border round trip journey) and make staging stops near the border for border-related transloading. Policies such as cabotage laws and the Free and Secure Trade (FAST) program are both believed to increase the negative logistical incentives which the border creates. This thesis examines how these policies negatively impact logistical efficiency and suggests avenues to explore policy reform.

Authors: Matthew Klein
Recommended Citation:
Klein, Matthew (2010). Pacific Highway Commercial Vehicle Operations: Border Policy and Logistical Efficiency in a Regional Context, University of Washington Master's Degree Thesis.
Thesis: Array

Optimization of Supply and Transportation Networks in an Epidemic Situation in Collaboration with the Seattle Flu Study

The mission of the Seattle Flu Study (SFS) is to prototype city-scale capabilities for epidemic preparedness and response. One of the aims of this study is to understand methods to implement rapid interventions outside of clinical settings and within 48-72 hours of the onset of symptoms, to enable the immediate diagnosis, treatment, or isolation of flu-positive individuals.

SFS has reached out to the Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center at the University of Washington to test various to develop models and perform sensitivity analyses on epidemic response scenarios via simulation and mathematical optimization. Modeling will allow SFS to measure and understand questions like, “when will our supply chain break?”, “how do you prevent it from breaking?” and “how do you get drugs and tests to people if your driver workforce gets sick?”. By modeling these types of scenarios, they will be able to assess the pros and cons of various supply chain strategies and develop multiple levers that can be pulled depending on the epidemic situation including prepositioning of orders, and leveraging in-house and supplementary private transportation alternatives (FedEx, etc.).

Student Thesis and Dissertations

Estimating the Location of Private Infrastructure for Delivery and Pick-Up Operations in Dense Urban Areas

URL: http://hdl.handle.net/1773/42251
Publication Date: 2018
Summary:

The growth of home deliveries, lower inventory levels and just-in-time deliveries drive the fragmentation of freight flows, increased frequency, more delivery addresses and smaller volumes. This leads to trucks inefficiently loaded and consequently more trucks in the road contributing to the growing congestion in cities. According to a study by INRIX and the Texas Transportation Institute, travelers in the U.S. are stuck 42 hours per rush hour commuter in their cars in 2014, that is twice what it was in 1982 and the problem is four times worse than in 1982 for cities of 500,000 people or less [28]. At the same time, a historical lack of integration of the freight transportation system into city planning efforts has left local governments unprepared. Under these circumstances, there is growing need for best practices for freight planning and management in U.S. cities. There is anecdotal evidence that the lack of areas for trucks to park and load/unload freight is one of the main causes of an inefficient urban freight parking infrastructure that leads to illegal parking and more congestion. The problem of lack of parking for freight loading/unloading has been studied with a focus on on-street parking. Meanwhile, the contribution of areas out of the public right of way (i.e. private) such as loading bays in buildings has not benefited from research. More importantly, the location and features of private freight parking are often unknown by local governments due to their private character.

This thesis presents the first predictive tool to estimate the presence of private freight loading/unloading infrastructure based on observable characteristics of property parcels and their buildings. The predictive model classifies parcels with and without these infrastructures using random forest, a supervised machine learning algorithm. The model was developed based on a rich geodatabase of private truck load/unload spaces in the City of Seattle and the King County tax parcel database. The performance of the random forest model was evaluated through cross-validated estimates of the test error. The distribution of the outcome variables is unbalance with over 90% of parcels without private freight infrastructure. To consider the problem of unbalance sample, the optimum model was set to maximize the area under the ROC curve (AUC). The authors investigated the confusion matrix and the model classifier was design to balance the sensitivity and specificity of the model. Model results showed AUC of 81.5%, a true positive rate of 82.1% and a misclassification error of 22.5%.

This research provides an assessment tool that reduces the field work required to develop a quality inventory of private freight loading/unloading infrastructure by targeting the parcel stock and making data collection methods more effective. Local governments can use this research to inform efforts to revise and update delivery operations and regulations of truck parking and loading.

Authors: José Luis Machado León
Recommended Citation:
Machado Leon, Jose Luis. (2018). Estimating the Location of Private Infrastructure for Delivery and Pick-Up Operations in Dense Urban Areas. University of Washington Master's Degree Thesis.
Thesis: Array
Student Thesis and Dissertations

Moving Goods to Consumers: Land Use Patterns, Logistics, and Emissions

URL: https://digital.lib.washington.edu/researchworks/handle/1773/27219
Publication Date: 2014
Summary:

Worldwide, awareness has been raised about the dangers of growing greenhouse gas emissions. In the United States, transportation is a key contributor to greenhouse gas emissions. American and European researchers have identified a potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by replacing passenger vehicle travel with delivery service. These reductions are possible because, while delivery vehicles have higher rates of greenhouse gas emissions than private light-duty vehicles, the routing of delivery vehicles to customers is far more efficient than those customers traveling independently. In addition to lowering travel-associated greenhouse gas emissions, because of their more efficient routing and tendency to occur during off-peak hours, delivery services have the potential to reduce congestion. Thus, replacing passenger vehicle travel with delivery service provides opportunity to address global concerns – greenhouse gas emissions and congestion. While addressing the impact of transportation on greenhouse gas emissions is critical, transportation also produces significant levels of criteria pollutants, which impact the health of those in the immediate area. These impacts are of particular concern in urban areas, which due to their constrained land availability increase proximity of residents to the roadway network. In the United States, heavy vehicles (those typically used for deliveries) produce a disproportionate amount of NOx and particulate matter – heavy vehicles represent roughly 9% of vehicle miles travelled but produce nearly 50% of the NOx and PM10 from transportation. Researchers have noted that urban policies designed to address local concerns including air quality impacts and noise pollution – like time and size restrictions – have a tendency to increase global impacts, by increasing the number of vehicles on the road, by increasing the total VMT required, or by increasing the amount of CO2 generated. The work presented here is designed to determine whether replacing passenger vehicle travel with delivery service can address both concerns simultaneously. In other words, can replacing passenger travel with delivery service reduce congestion and CO2 emissions as well as selected criteria pollutants? Further, does the design of the delivery service impacts the results? Lastly, how do these impacts differ in rural versus urban land use patterns? This work models the amount of VMT, CO2, NOx, and PM10 generated by personal travel and delivery vehicles in a number of different development patterns and in a number of different scenarios, including various warehouse locations. In all scenarios, VMT is reduced through the use of delivery service, and in all scenarios, NOx and PM10 are lowest when passenger vehicles are used for the last mile of travel. The goods movement scheme that results in the lowest generation of CO2, however, varies by municipality. Regression models for each goods movement scheme and models that compare sets of goods movement schemes were developed. The most influential variables in all models were measures of roadway density and proximity of a service area to the regional warehouse. These results allow for a comparison of the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions in the form of CO2 to local criteria pollutants (NOx and PM10) for each scenario. These efforts will contribute to increased integration of goods movement in urban planning, inform policies designed to mitigate the impacts of goods movement vehicles, and provide insights into achieving sustainability targets, especially as online shopping and goods delivery becomes more prevalent.

Authors: Erica Wygonik
Recommended Citation:
Wygonic, Erica. 2014, Moving Goods to Consumers: Land Use Patterns, Logistics, and Emissions, University of Washington, Doctoral Dissertation.
Thesis: Array