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Urban Freight Lab

Research Topic: The Final 50 Feet of the Urban Goods Delivery System

The Urban Freight Lab coined the term “Final 50 Feet” and defined it as the supply chain segment that begins when a delivery vehicle pulls into a parking space and stops moving — in public load/unload spaces at the curb or in an alley, or a building’s loading dock or internal freight bay. It tracks the delivery process inside buildings and ends where the customer takes receipt of their goods. This research analyzes processes, develops potential solutions, and tests operational improvements in the final segment of the urban goods delivery system.

Technical Report

Freight and Transit Lane Case Study

 
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Publication Date: 2020
Summary:

The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) engaged the Urban Freight Lab at the Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center at the University of Washington to conduct research on the impacts of a freight and transit (FAT) lane that was implemented in January 2019 in Seattle. To improve freight mobility in the City of Seattle and realize the objectives included in the city’s Freight Master Plan (FMP), the FAT lane was opened upon the closing of the Alaskan Way Viaduct.

The objective of this study was therefore to evaluate the performance and utilization of the FAT lane. Street camera video recordings from two separate intersection locations were used for this research.

Vehicles were categorized into ten different groups, including drayage with container and drayage without container, to capture their different behavior. Drayage vehicles are vehicles transporting cargo to a warehouse or to another port. Human data reducers used street camera videos to count vehicles in those ten designated groups.

The results of the traffic volume analysis showed that transit vehicles chose the FAT lane over the general purpose lane at ratios of higher than 90 percent. By the time of day, transit vehicle volumes in the FAT lane followed a different pattern than freight vehicles. Transit vehicle volumes peaked around afternoon rush hours, but freight activity decreased during that same time. Some freight vehicles used the FAT lane, but their ratio in the FAT lane decreased when bus volumes increased. The ratio of unauthorized vehicles in the FAT lane increased during congestion.

Further analysis described in this report included a multinomial logistic regression model to estimate the factors influencing the choice of FAT lane over the regular lane. The results showed that lane choice was dependent on the day of week, time of day, vehicle type, and location features. Density, as a measure of congestion, was found to be statistically insignificant for the model.

Authors: Urban Freight Lab
Recommended Citation:
Urban Freight Lab (2020). Freight and Transit Lane Case Study. 

The Final 50 Feet of the Urban Goods Delivery System (Task Order 1)

Urban goods delivery is an essential but little-noticed activity in urban areas. For the last 40 years, deliveries have been mostly performed by a private sector shipping industry that operates within general city traffic conditions.

However, in recent years e-commerce has created a rapid increase in deliveries and an explosion of activity in the future. Meeting current and future demand is creating unprecedented challenges for shippers to deliver increased volumes and meet increasing customer expectations for efficient and timely delivery. Delivery vehicles parked in travel lanes, unloading taking place on crowded sidewalks, and commercial truck noise during late night and early morning hours are familiar stories in urban areas. These conditions are particularly problematic in Seattle’s high-density areas of Downtown, Uptown (lower Queen Anne), South Lake Union, and First and Capitol Hills. Please note that at the time this research report was published, this area was called Center City in Seattle’s planning documents but is now referred to as the Greater Downtown area.

This was the first research project in SDOT’s strategic partnership with the Urban Freight Lab (UFL), which is part of the Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center at the University of Washington. The Urban Freight Lab members come from retail, delivery, and building management sectors; SDOT and the members set clear and measurable goals for each research project. UFL researchers collect original and existent data, analyze it, and pilot test promising strategies in the real world.

This report provides the first assessment in any U.S. city of the privately-owned and operated elements of the Final 50 Feet of goods delivery supply chains. These include private truck freight bays and loading docks, and delivery policies and operations within buildings located in Center City.

Key Findings

The research showed that in three of Seattle’s Center City neighborhoods Downtown, South Lake Union and private loading bays and docks are scarce, forcing delivery drivers to park in public spaces. Researchers found that there are 144 entrances to internal loading bays, 93 exterior loading docks, and 9 exterior loading areas. Only 13% of all buildings in downtown, uptown, and South Lake Union have private loading bays and/or docks; 87% must use the city’s curb and alley space to receive deliveries. The research team also quantified and created maps of the Final 50 Feet delivery process flows in and around five prototype buildings in Seattle (the Seattle Municipal Tower, a 62-story office building; Insignia residential tower; the Dexter Horton historic building; the Four Seasons hotel and condominium; and Westlake Mall retail Center). The researchers then quantified delay in the process steps for the Seattle Municipal Tower to understand which improvement strategies will have the greatest payoff: clearing security took 12% of the total time; looking for tenants and/or their locations and riding the freight elevator took 61% of the total time. Data showed that a smart locker system in the loading bay level of the Seattle Municipal Tower would reduce the time delivery people spend in the building by up to 73%. It would almost eliminate failed first deliveries and dramatically cut the mean truck dwell time in parking spaces serving the Tower. This result led to the Final 50 Feet: Common Carrier Locker Pilot Test at Seattle Municipal Tower.

Video:
How the Final 50 Feet Research is Being Used (National Academies Transportation Research Board)

Paper

Do Parcel Lockers Reduce Delivery Times? Evidence from the Field

 
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URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tre.2023.103070
Publication: Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review
Volume: 172 (2023)
Publication Date: 2023
Summary:

Common carrier parcel lockers have emerged as a secure, automated, self-service means of delivery consolidation in congested urban areas, which are believed to mitigate last-mile delivery challenges by reducing out-of-vehicle delivery times and consequently vehicle dwell times at the curb. However, little research exists to empirically demonstrate the environmental and efficiency gains from this technology. In this study, we designed a nonequivalent group pre-test/post-test control experiment to estimate the causal effects of a parcel locker on delivery times in a residential building in downtown Seattle. The causal effects are measured in terms of vehicle dwell time and the time delivery couriers spend inside the building, through the difference-in-difference method and using a similar nearby residential building as a control. The results showed a statistically significant decrease in time spent inside the building and a small yet insignificant reduction in delivery vehicle dwell time at the curb. The locker was also well received by the building managers and residents.

Authors: Dr. Andisheh RanjbariCaleb DiehlDr. Giacomo Dalla ChiaraDr. Anne Goodchild
Recommended Citation:
Ranjbari, A., Diehl, C., Dalla Chiara, G., & Goodchild, A. (2023). Do Commercial Vehicles Cruise for Parking? Empirical Evidence from Seattle. Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, 172, 103070. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tre.2023.103070 
Report

Mapping the Challenges to Sustainable Urban Freight

 
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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:

  1. What is the current state of sustainable urban freight planning in the United States?
  2. 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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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

Common MicroHub Research Project: Research Scan

 
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Publication Date: 2020
Summary:

This research scan revealed a lack of an established and widely accepted definition for the concept of consolidation centers or microhubs. Many recent implementations of urban freight consolidation have focused on bundling goods close to the delivery point by creating logistical platforms in the heart of urban areas. These have shared a key purpose: to avoid freight vehicles traveling into urban centers with partial loads.

To establish definitions of micro-consolidation and its typologies, it is important to review previous efforts in the literature that have explained and evaluated urban consolidation centers and lessons that have led to the search for new alternatives. Starting in 1970s, the urban consolidation center (UCC) concept was implemented in several European cities and urban regions. These were mostly led by commercial enterprises with temporary or even structural support from the government to compensate for additional transshipment costs. Allen et. al. defined the UCC as a “logistic base located in the vicinity of the place of performing services (e.g., city centers, whole cities, or specific locations like shopping malls) where numerous enterprisers deliver goods destined for the serviced area from which consolidated deliveries as well as additional logistic and retailed services are realized”.

Many of these implementations failed to operate in the long term because of low throughput volumes, the inability to operate without financial support from government, and dissatisfaction with service levels. The cost of having an additional transshipment point often prevented the facilities from being cost-effective, and they could not operate when governmental subsidies were removed (4). From a commercial perspective, experiences with publicly operated UCCs were mostly negative, and centers that have operated since 2000 are often run single-handedly by major logistics operators.

Although it appears that many UCCs were not successful, that does not mean that the idea of an additional transshipment point should be sidelined completely (4). Several studies have mentioned the micro-consolidation concept as a transition from the classic UCC. Learning from previous experiences, Janjevic et. al. defined micro-consolidation centers as facilities that are located closer to the delivery area and have a more limited spatial range for delivery than classic UCCs. Similarly, Verlinde et. al., referred to micro-consolidation centers as “alternative” additional transshipment points that downscale the scope of the consolidation initiative further than a UCC.

In this project, a delivery microhub (or simply a microhub) was defined as a special case of UCC with closer proximity to the delivery point and serving a smaller range of service area. A microhub is a logistics facility where goods are bundled inside the urban area boundaries, that serves a limited spatial range, and that allows a mode shift to low-emission vehicles or soft transportation modes (e.g., walking or cargo bikes) for last-mile deliveries.

Authors: Urban Freight Lab
Recommended Citation:
Urban Freight Lab (2020). Common MicroHub Research Project: Research Scan.
Paper

Urban Form and Last-Mile Goods Movement: Factors Affecting Vehicle Miles Travelled and Emissions

 
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URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2016.09.015
Publication: Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment
Volume: 61 (A)
Pages: 217-229
Publication Date: 2018
Summary:

There are established relationships between urban form and passenger travel, but less is known about urban form and goods movement. The work presented in this paper evaluates how the design of a delivery service and the urban form in which it operates affects its performance, as measured by vehicle miles traveled, CO2, NOx, and PM10 emissions.

This work compares simulated amounts of VMT, CO2, NOx, and PM10 generated by last-mile travel in several different development patterns and in many different goods movement structures, including various warehouse locations. Last-mile travel includes personal travel or delivery vehicles delivering goods to customers. 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 efforts will support urban planning for goods movement, 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 become more prevalent.

Authors: Dr. Anne Goodchild, Erica Wygonik
Recommended Citation:
Wygonik, Erica and Anne Goodchild. (2018) Urban Form and Last-Mile Goods Movement: Factors Affecting Vehicle Miles Travelled and Emissions. Transportation Research. Part D, Transport and Environment, 61, 217–229. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trd.2016.09.015

The Final 50 Feet: Common Carrier Locker Pilot Test at Seattle Municipal Tower (Part of Task Order 2)

As part of the Final 50 Feet Research Program, the Urban Freight Lab engaged multiple partners and funding sources to successfully pilot test a common carrier locker system (open to all retail and multiple delivery firms) that created delivery density in the Seattle Municipal Tower.

The pilot tested the ability of new mini-distribution centers such as smart lockers to create delivery density and reduce the time delivery people have to spend in urban towers to complete the work. The Lab collected “before” and “after” data to evaluate the pilot’s premise: that when delivery trucks can pull into a load/unload space that’s close to a mini-distribution node with delivery density (lots of deliveries in one place), everyone benefits. Lab members UPS and the U.S. Postal Service participated in this pilot, so any package they delivered to the building went into the locker system. The pilot was open to the first 100 Municipal Tower tenants who signed up to use the lockers from March to April 2018.

This pilot reduced the average amount of time parcel delivery personnel spent doing their work in the 62-floor office tower by 78%, when compared with going floor-to-floor, door-to-door in the tower. It demonstrates the UFL’s unique capability to develop cross-functional business and city working partnerships, gain senior executives’ participation in research, and effectively manage innovative and complex projects that have a high level of uncertainty. This pilot provides evidence that the common carrier locker system strategy can achieve a significant reduction in delivery time.

Report

Supporting Comprehensive Urban Freight Planning by Mapping Private Load and Unload Facilities

 
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Publication Date: 2023
Summary:

Freight load and unload facilities located off the public right-of-way are typically not documented in publicly available databases. Without detailed knowledge of these facilities, i.e. private freight load and unload infrastructure, cities are limited in their ability to complete system-wide freight planning and to comprehensively evaluate the total supply of load and unload spaces in the city. To address this challenge, this research describes the development and application of a data collection methodology and a typology of private freight load/unload facilities for their inventory and documentation in dense urban centers.

The tools developed in this research are practice-ready and can be implemented in other cities to support research, policy and planning approaches that aim to improve the urban freight system. Assessment of the degree of harmonization between the current delivery vehicle dimensions and infrastructure they service is a crucial step of any policy that addresses private freight load/unload infrastructures. This includes providing: the adequate access dimensions, capacity to accommodate the volume and vehicle type, and an effective connecting design between the facilities and the public right-of-way.

A case study in Downtown Seattle found more than 337 private freight facilities for loading/unloading of goods but that translates into only 5% of the buildings in the densest areas of the city had these facilities. Alleys were found to play a critical role since 36% of this freight infrastructure was accessed through alleys.

This research results in the first urban inventory of private freight load/unload infrastructure, which has been shown to be a valuable resource for the City of Seattle that can be used to better understand and plan for the urban freight system.

Authors: José Luis Machado LeónGabriela Girón-ValderramaDr. Anne GoodchildDr. Ed McCormack
Recommended Citation:
Machado León, J., Girón-Valderrama, G., Goodchild, A., & McCormack, E. Supporting Comprehensive Urban Freight Planning by Mapping Private Load and Unload Facilities (2023).
Paper

Defining Urban Freight Microhubs: A Case Study Analysis

 
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URL: https://doi.org/10.3390/su14010532
Publication: Sustainability
Volume: 14 (1), 532
Publication Date: 2021
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.

To expand this knowledge, this research combines 17 empirical cases from Europe and North America to develop a framework for classifying different microhubs typologies. This research presents an integrated view of the cases and develops a common language for understanding microhub typologies and definitions. The research proposes microhubs as an important opportunity to improve urban freight sustainability and efficiency and one possible step to manage the challenge of multi-sector collaboration.

Authors: Şeyma GüneşDr. Travis FriedDr. Anne Goodchild, Konstantina Katsela (University of Gothenburg), Michael Browne (University of Gothenburg)
Recommended Citation:
Katsela, Konstantina, Şeyma Güneş, Travis Fried, Anne Goodchild, and Michael Browne. 2022. "Defining Urban Freight Microhubs: A Case Study Analysis" Sustainability 14, no. 1: 532. https://doi.org/10.3390/su14010532