As e-commerce and urban deliveries spike, there is an increasing demand for curbside loading/unloading space. However, commercial vehicle drivers face numerous challenges while navigating dense urban road networks. Literature on the topic of how commercial vehicle drivers make choices about when and where to park is scarce, and data from those available studies usually come from field studies in which limited situations can be observed, without experimental controls, and there is an absence of known driver characteristics. Therefore, this study used a heavy vehicle driving simulator to examine the behavior of commercial vehicle drivers in various parking and delivery situations. A heavy vehicle driving simulator experiment examined the behaviors of commercial vehicle drivers under various parking and delivery situations. The heavy vehicle experiment was completed by 14 participants. The experiment included 24 scenarios with several independent variables, including number of lanes (two-lane and four-lane roads), with/without a bike lane, available/unavailable passenger vehicle parking space, CVLZs (no CVLZ, occupied CVLZ, and unoccupied CVLZ), and delivery time (3-5 mins and 20-60 mins). By collecting speed, eye-movement, and stress data during the experiment, the project produced results that support the development of more effective curb management strategies that will maintain efficient delivery operations while balancing the needs of all road users.
Publication Type: Technical Report
Interview Results: Carrier Perspectives on Delivery Operations and Zero-Emission Zones in Downtown Portland
In 2023, Portland was awarded a U.S. Department of Transportation SMART grant to pilot a Zero-Emission Delivery Zone (ZEDZ). Funding for this Stage One SMART grant will allow PBOT to trial changing three to five truck loading zones into “Zero-Emission Delivery” loading zones in downtown Portland. The Urban Freight Lab (UFL) was approached by PBOT to assist in their SMART grant implementation by providing subject matter expertise on the topics of urban freight, curb management, and freight decarbonization. The UFL team created a questionnaire and interview guide to inquire about current carrier operations, current and future fleet composition, and loading activities of carriers operating in the City of Portland.
The selected organizations were identified as carriers or organizations that make deliveries into the proposed Zero-Emission Delivery Zone (ZEDZ) in downtown Portland. The UFL reached out to over 20 different organizations spanning different business sectors and company sizes, from large national parcel carriers to regional wholesale distributors to small delivery companies. Ultimately, only four organizations responded to requests for interviews. Between June and August 2024, the UFL conducted these interviews. Table 1 provides an overview of the companies interviewed and their main business activities. Company and organization names are omitted from this report to anonymize the respondents.
The goal of the interviews was to understand the parking behaviors and fleets of individual companies. In particular, the interviewers focused on understanding the current delivery operations in the Portland area, the related parking and routing behaviors of their delivery drivers, fleet composition, and the challenges they face in performing deliveries in the study area.
Each interview was 1-hour long and was guided on a questionnaire reported in the appendix. The questionnaire was developed into three sections:
- Organization – Describe their main business activities, logistics network and fleet composition.
- Routing, parking, and payment behaviors – Description of typical drivers’ operations in the City of Portland and specifically downtown, including routing and parking behaviors, as well as use of paid parking and citations.
- Future scenarios – Companies were asked about zero-emission vehicles and implications of the ZEDZ on operations.
This report contains the main results of the interviews, including a description of the logistics network infrastructure, delivery operations, and curb use behaviors. The final section provides the key lessons learned.
Managing Increasing Demand for Curb Space in the City of the Future
The rapid rise of on-demand transportation and e-commerce goods deliveries, as well as increased cycling rates and transit use, are increasing demand for curb space. This demand has resulted in competition among modes, failed goods deliveries, roadway and curbside congestion, and illegal parking. This research increases our understanding of existing curb usage and provides new solutions to officials, planners, and engineers responsible for managing this scarce resource in the future. The research team worked with local agencies to ensure the study’s relevance to their needs and that the results will be broadly applicable for other cities. This research supports the development of innovative curb space designs and ensures that our urban streets may operate more efficiently, safely, and reliably for both goods and people.
The research elements included conducting a thorough scan and documenting previous studies that have examined curb space management, identifying emerging urban policies developed in response to growth, reviewing existing curb management policies and regulations, developing a conceptual curb use policy framework, reviewing existing and emerging technologies that will support flexible curb space management, evaluating curb use policy frameworks by collecting curb utilization data and establishing performance metrics, and simulating curb performance under different policy frameworks.
Chang, K., Goodchild, A., Ranjbari, A., and McCormack, E. (2022). Managing Increasing Demand for Curb Space in the City of the Future. PacTrans Final Project Report.
Understanding Pacific Highway Commercial Vehicle Operations to Support Emissions Reduction Programs
Goodchild, A., & Klein, M. (2011). Understanding Pacific Highway Commercial Vehicle Operations to Support Emissions Reduction Programs (No. TNW2010-11). Transportation Northwest (Organization).
An Examination of the Impact of Commercial Parking Utilization on Cyclist Behavior in Urban Environments
There is little research on the behavioral interaction between bicycle lanes and commercial vehicle loading zones (CVLZ) in the United States. These interactions are important to understand, to preempt increasing conflicts between truckers and bicyclists. In this study, a bicycling simulator experiment examined bicycle and truck interactions. The experiment was successfully completed by 48 participants. The bicycling simulator collected data regarding a participant’s velocity and lateral position. Three independent variables reflecting common engineering approaches were included in this experiment: pavement marking (L1: white lane markings with no supplemental pavement color, termed white lane markings, L2: white lane markings with solid green pavement applied on the conflict area, termed solid green, and L3: white lane markings with dashed green pavement applied on the conflict area, termed dashed green), signage (L1: No sign and L2: a truck warning sign), and truck maneuver (L1: no truck in CVLZ, L2: truck parked in CVLZ, and L3: truck pulling out of CVLZ).
The results showed that truck presence does have an effect on bicyclist’s performance, and this effect varies based on the engineering and design treatments employed. Of the three independent variables, truck maneuvering had the greatest impact by decreasing mean bicyclist velocity and increasing mean lateral position. It was also observed that when a truck was present in a CVLZ, bicyclists had a lower velocity and lower divergence from right-edge of bike lane on solid green pavement, and a higher divergence from the right-edge of bike lane was observed when a warning sign was present.
Hurwitz, David S., Ed McCormack, Anne Goodchild, Masoud Ghodrat Abadi, and Manali Sheth. An Examination of the Impact of Commercial Parking Utilization on Cyclist Behavior in Urban Environments. 2018.
Transit Corridor Study
This study is sponsored by Amazon, Bellevue Transportation department, Challenge Seattle, King County Metro, Seattle Department of Transportation, Sound Transit, and Uber, with support from the Mobility Innovation Center at UW CoMotion.
- a virtual workshop with participants from beneficiary agencies and stakeholders to solicit input;
- an online crowdsourcing survey to engage the community and gather feedback from all road users;
- route-level ridership data from King County Metro; and
- aggregated pick-up/drop-off data on ridehailing activities from SharedStreets.
- This work will help identify network-wide road and route segments with slow and/or unreliable bus travel times. We may also be able to identify main causes of delay in the study corridors.
- Moreover, we expect that this work will generate reusable analytical tools that can be applied by local agencies on an ongoing basis, and by other researchers and transportation agencies in their own jurisdictions.
- The outcomes of this work will enable identifying corridors with slow and/or unreliable bus travel times as candidates for specific countermeasures to increase transit performance, such as increased enforcement, modified curb use rules, or preferential bus or street use treatments. Targeting such countermeasures towards priority locations will result in faster and more reliable bus operations, and a more efficient transportation network at a lower cost to transit agencies.
Structural and Geographic Shifts in the Washington Warehousing Industry: Transportation Impacts for the Green River Valley
Goodchild, A., & Andrioli, D. (2009). Structural and Geographic Shifts in the Washington Warehousing Industry: Transportation Impacts for the Green River Valley (No. TNW2009-04). Transportation Northwest (Organization).
An Evaluation of Bicycle Safety Impacts of Seattle’s Commercial Vehicle Load Zones
The Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) partnered with the University of Washington to explore how commercial vehicle parking in Seattle’s downtown area affects the safety of bicyclists. The hypothesis was that increased truck access to SDOT’s commercial vehicle loading zones (CVLZs) can positively contribute to bicycle safety. Because CVLZs provide truck drivers with more access to legal parking, their presence could reduce incidences of trucks parking illegally in the street or blocking bicycle lanes, thus reducing the necessity for bicyclists to maneuver around them. This research explored this hypothesis by using four methods, an analysis of bike-trucks accident data, interviews with bicyclists and truck drivers who frequently travel in downtown Seattle, analysis of video recordings of cyclists riding downtown, and observations of truck loading/unloading operations downtown.
The research determined that from bicyclists’ perspectives, illegally parked trucks were a more serious problem than the locations of CVLZs. Therefore, increasing the availability of legal truck parking should have a positive effect on bicyclist safety and level of stress. When trucks park in the bike lane, cyclists are required to maneuver into the stream of traffic, increasing level of exposure and accident risk. Similarly, both the cyclist interviews and video data indicated that construction sites are problematic locations for illegally parked trucks blocking cyclist travel lanes. Better enforcement of parking regulations near construction sites and better site planning would help alleviate a significant amount of conflict between cyclists and parked trucks.
Loading zones on higher speed or busy streets or in areas where cyclists travel downhill increase the danger of those areas. In some areas, it may be possible to relocate loading zones around the corner, onto less busy side streets, to eliminate the need for cyclists to choose between merging into a busy lane to pass a truck or passing close enough to the truck that the delivery operations may put obstacles in the bicyclist’s path. If loading zones are moved, the zones should be situated at the beginning of the block and should allow drivers to still reach the businesses they are serving quickly and without having to maneuver or cross a street. This will encourage the use of the loading zone as opposed to illegal parking.
Butrina, Polina, Edward McCormack, Anne Goodchild, and Jerome Drescher. "An Evaluation of Bicycle Safety Impacts of Seattle’s Commercial Vehicle Load Zones." (2016).
Year Two Progress Report: Technology Integration to Gain Commercial Efficiency for the Urban Goods Delivery System, Meet Future Demand for City Passenger and Delivery Load/Unload Spaces, and Reduce Energy Consumption
The objectives of this project are to develop and implement a technology solution to support research, development, and demonstration of data processing techniques, models, simulations, a smart phone application, and a visual-confirmation system to:
- Reduce delivery vehicle parking seeking behavior by approximately 20% in the pilot test area, by returning current and predicted load/unload space occupancy information to users on a web-based and/or mobile platform, to inform real-time parking decisions
- Reduce parcel truck dwell time in pilot test areas in Seattle and Bellevue, Washington, by approximately 30%, thereby increasing productivity of load/unload spaces near common carrier locker systems, and
- Improve the transportation network (which includes roads, intersections, warehouses, fulfillment centers, etc.) and commercial firms’ efficiency by increasing curb occupancy rates to roughly 80%, and alley space occupancy rates from 46% to 60% during peak hours, and increasing private loading bay occupancy rates in the afternoon peak times, in the pilot test area.
The project team has designed a 3-year plan to achieve the objectives of this project.
In Year 1, the team developed integrated technologies and finalized the pilot test parameters. This involved finalizing the plan for placing sensory devices and common parcel locker systems on public and private property; issuing the request for proposals; selecting vendors; and gaining approvals necessary to execute the plan. The team also developed techniques to preprocess the data streams from the sensor devices, and began to design the prototype smart phone parking app to display real-time load/unload space availability, as well as the truck load/unload space behavior model.
In Year 2, the team executed the implementation plan:
- oversaw installation of the in-road sensors, and collecting and processing data,
- managed installation, marketing and operations of three common locker systems in the pilot test area,
- tested the prototype smart phone parking app with initial data stream, and
- developed a truck parking behavior simulation model.
Urban Freight Lab (2021). Year Two Progress Report: Technology Integration to Gain Commercial Efficiency for the Urban Goods Delivery System.
The Final 50 Feet of the Urban Goods Delivery System: Pilot Test of an Innovative Improvement Strategy
This report presents a pilot test of a common carrier smart locker system — a promising strategy to reduce truck trip and failed first delivery attempts in urban buildings. The Urban Freight Lab tested this system in the 62-story Seattle Municipal Tower skyscraper in downtown Seattle.
The Urban Freight Lab identified two promising strategies for the pilot test: (1) Locker system: smaller- to medium-sized deliveries can be placed into a locker that was temporarily installed during the pilot test; and (2) Grouped-tenant-floor-drop-off-points for medium-sized items if the locker was too small or full (4-6 floor groups set up by Seattle Department of Transportation and Seattle City Light).
Users picked up their goods at the designated drop-off points. Flyers with information on drop-off-points were given to the carriers. UFL researchers evaluated the ability of the standardized second step pilot test to reduce the number of failed first delivery attempts by (1) Collecting original data to document the number of failed first delivery attempts before and after the pilot test; and (2) Comparing them to the pilot test goals.
Goodchild, A., Kim, H., & Ivanov, B. Final 50 Feet of the Urban Goods Delivery System: Pilot Test of an Innovative Improvement Strategy. (2019)