October 12, 2020 — The Urban Freight Lab has developed an Urban Goods Delivery Toolkit, designed as a one-stop-shop for cities and transportation researchers across the U.S. to improve functionality in the Final 50 Feet segment, improving both load/unload parking space productivity and reducing failed first delivery attempts.
“The toolkit gives any City access to methods we’ve developed in the Urban Freight Lab. While we know many Cities are already benefiting from the reports and publications on our website, the toolkit format makes it a little easier to find these tools and to start using them,” said Anne Goodchild, founding director of the Supply Chain Transportation & Logistics Center.
Part of the Lab’s Final 50 Feet suite of research projects, the Toolkit builds and improves on the prior data-collection methods enabling other cities to replicate the work done in Seattle. It includes the following comprehensive step by step tools:
- Curb Occupancy Toolkit: tools for conducting a study that captures (1) the parking behavior of commercial vehicles along the block face, and (2) parking activities of all vehicles in commercial vehicle loading zone, drawing on an Urban Freight Lab curb occupancy study tracking parking activity along the blocks surrounding five archetypal buildings in Seattle’s Greater Downtown.
- Alley Occupancy Toolkit: tools for documenting commercial vehicle occupancy of alleys to better understand current usage and operational capacity, recording usage patterns such as length of time parked, times of vacancy, and what types of vehicles park in alleys.
- Alley Infrastructure Toolkit: tools for using and creating a GIS database, mapping the alley network’s geospatial location and documenting physical attributes
- Private Loading Infrastructure Inventory Toolkit: tools for mapping locations of private loading docks, loading bays, and loading areas for commercial vehicles with key design and capacity features
“We think this will benefit individual Cities, but also urban freight more broadly as cities can compare and share,” said Goodchild. “We are pleased to be part of building urban freight capabilities and insights, and solving urban freight challenges globally.”
This toolkit is designed to help transportation planners, traffic engineers, freight system managers, parking and operations strategists, and researchers build a fundamental knowledge base for planning; managing parking operations; managing emergency management and response; updating traffic, land use and building codes; and modeling future scenarios and needs, and help cities meet the ever-increasing demand for truck and other load/unload activities.
Explore the Toolkit and tell us how you are using it.
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About the Urban Freight Lab (UFL): An innovative public-private partnership housed at the Supply Chain Transportation & Logistics Center at the University of Washington, the Urban Freight Lab is a structured workgroup that brings together private industry with City transportation officials to design and test solutions around urban freight management. Since launching in December 2016, the UFL has completed an innovative suite of research projects on the Final 50 Feet of delivery, providing foundational data and proven strategies to help cities reduce truck dwell times in load/unload spaces, and failed first delivery attempts by carriers, which lowers congestion, emissions, and costs.