Publications

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.

Summary:
Space is the scarcest resource in cities. How can we best use street space to do more for more street users? Mention the “space race” and it tends to conjure up the Cold War-era competition between the United States and the then-USSR to “conquer” outer space. But at the winter meeting of the Urban Freight Lab (UFL), members heard about a different race playing out on our streets right under our noses. It’s what Philippe Crist of the International Transportation...

Summary:
With growing freight operations throughout the world, there is a push for transportation systems to accommodate trucks during loading and unloading operations. Currently, many urban locations do not provide loading and unloading zones, which results in trucks parking in places that obstruct bicyclist’s roadway infrastructure (e.g., bicycle lanes).

Summary:
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.

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.

Summary:
Consider it the left-hand, right-hand challenge of the urban freight landscape. But a gentler riff on the whole “the left-hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing.” Each hand does know something about what the other hand is doing, but probably not enough. On the left, there are Urban Freight Lab (UFL) member companies like Amazon and UPS that use the public right of way to move goods. On the right, various levels of government manage and regulate that...

Summary:
Common-carrier parcel lockers present a solution for decreasing delivery times, traffic congestion, and emissions in dense urban areas through consolidation of deliveries. Multi-story residential buildings with large numbers of residents, and thus a high volume of online package orders, are one of the best venues for installing parcel lockers. But what is the right size for a residential building locker that would suit the residents’ and building managers’ needs?

Summary:
A growing body of research looks specifically at freight vehicle parking choices for purposes of deliveries to street retail, and choice impacts on travel time/uncertainty, congestion, and emissions. However, little attention was given to large urban freight traffic generators, e.g., shopping malls and commercial buildings with offices and retail. These pose different challenges to manage freight vehicle parking demand, due to the limited parking options.

Summary:
The central research question for this project explores the distributional impacts of ecommerce and its implications for equity and justice. The research aims to investigate how commercial land use affects people and communities. In 2018, U.S. warehouses surpassed office buildings as the primary form of commercial and industrial land use, now accounting for 18 billion square feet of floor space.

Summary:
In this research we consider an approach for improving the efficiency and tightness of column generation (CG) methods for solving vehicle routing problems. This work builds upon recent work on Local Area (LA) routes. LA routes rely on pre-computing (prior to any call to pricing during CG) the lowest cost elementary sub-route (called an LA arc) for each tuple consisting of the following: (1) a customer to begin the LA arc, (2) a customer to end the LA arc, which...

Summary:
Parking cruising is a well-known phenomenon in passenger transportation, and a significant source of congestion and pollution in urban areas. While urban commercial vehicles are known to travel longer distances and to stop more frequently than passenger vehicles, little is known about their parking cruising behavior, nor how parking infrastructure affects such behavior.

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.

Summary:
Green loading zones (GLZs) are curb spaces dedicated to the use of electric or alternative fuel (“green”) delivery vehicles. Some US cities have begun piloting GLZs to incentivize companies to purchase and operate more green vehicles. However, there are several questions to be answered prior to a GLZ implementation, including siting, potential users, and their willing to pay.

Summary:
This three-year project supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Vehicle Technologies Office has the potential to radically improve the urban freight system in ways that help both the public and private sectors.

Summary:
We utilize an unsupervised learning algorithm called-modes clustering (Huang 1998), which is similar to the better-known-means method (Hartigan and Wong 1979), but with a dissimilarity measure designed for categorical variables (Cao et al. 2012), originally developed for analyzing sequential categorical data such as gene sequences (Goodall 1966), but also amenable to curb zoning types.