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Urban Freight Lab

Research Topic: Urban Planning

Urban planning is the process of developing and designing urban areas to meet the needs of a community, including techniques such as predicting population growth, zoning, geographic mapping and analysis, analyzing park space, surveying the water supply, identifying transportation patterns, recognizing food supply demands, allocating healthcare and social services, and analyzing the impact of land use.

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

Evacuating Isolated Islands with Marine Resources: A Bowen Island Case Study

 
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URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2022.102865
Publication: International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction
Volume: 72
Publication Date: 2022
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. Multiple vessel trips are necessary to evacuate the population from suitable access points, which previous studies did not entertain. Furthermore, most existing studies either focus on evacuations from an academic, or from a government perspective. Instead, this paper presents a collaborative approach. It applies a recently developed evacuation routing model that optimizes the evacuation plan for Bowen Island in Canada through minimizing the expected evacuation time across disaster scenarios. These were designed with the participation of a broad range of stakeholders, from local residents and volunteer groups to agencies from all levels of government and companies, which integrates both academic and practical perspectives to maximize solution quality. Different options for fleet sizes, staging locations and scenarios were considered. The results show that the optimized evacuation time for Bowen Island varies between 1 and 8 h, as it strongly depends on the disaster scenario, the evacuation fleet, and can be accelerated by temporary staging areas. The suitability of the approach for evacuation studies can be confirmed through the identification of key improvements for increased community resilience and the inclusion of the results in the official Bowen Island evacuation plan.

Authors: Fiete KruteinDr. Anne Goodchild, Jennifer McGowan
Recommended Citation:
Krutein, K. F., McGowan, J., & Goodchild, A. (2022). Evacuating isolated islands with marine resources: A Bowen island case study. International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, 72, 102865. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijdrr.2022.102865.
Paper

Mapping Urban Freight Infrastructure for Planning: A Demonstration of a Methodology

URL: https://trid.trb.org/view/1497151
Publication: Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board
Publication Date: 2018
Summary:

Urban transportation infrastructure includes facilities such as loading docks and curb space which are important for freight pick-up and delivery operations. Information about the location and nature of these facilities is typically not documented for public or private urban freight stakeholders and therefore cannot be used to support more effective private sector operations or public sector planning and engineering decisions. Consequently, there is considerable value in performing an accurate inventory and evaluation of the system. In response to this urban freight challenge, the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) contracted with the Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center (SCTL) at the University of Washington to develop a process to address the lack of information regarding the capacity for freight and parcel load and unload operations in dense urban areas of Seattle. This works focuses on the development of a data collection method for documenting private urban freight infrastructure that does not require prior permission, is ground-truthed, and can be completed within reasonable cost and time constraints. This paper presents the methodology, which consists of a survey form, survey collection app, data quality control process, data structure and a proposed typology for off public right of way freight loading / unloading infrastructure based on basic physical infrastructure characteristics. The data collection process methodology is applied to three Seattle urban centers. The method was then revised and improved for a second data collection effort in two additional urban centers.

Authors: Dr. Anne GoodchildGabriela Girón-ValderramaDr. Ed McCormackJosé Luis Machado León
Recommended Citation:
Machado-León, Jose Luis, Gabriela del Carmen Giron-Valderrama, Anne Goodchild, and Edward McCormack. Mapping Urban Freight Infrastructure for Planning: A Demonstration of a Methodology. No. 18-06171. 2018.