Publications

Summary:
More than 80 percent of Americans have purchased goods online and, in 2016, more than 8 percent of all retail sales in the U.S. took place online. The growth of ecommerce is putting increasing pressure on local governments to rethink how they manage street curb parking and alley operations for trucks and other delivery vehicles. It is also forcing building developers and managers to plan for the influx of online goods. To develop practical solutions to these problems, in 2016...

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:
We have digitization to thank for today’s urban freight landscape. Digitization has long been the backbone of things we now take for granted — from TNCs (Transportation Network Companies) Uber and Lyft to online shopping and the complex supply chain needed to make that ecommerce happen. Digitization is what gives ecommerce’s biggest player — Amazon — visibility into its packages and enables it to deliver faster and more reliably than ever. So digitalization isn’t new.

Summary:
With growing freight operations within the United States, there continues to be a push for urban streets 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 can obstruct roadway infrastructure designated to vulnerable road users (e.g., pedestrians and cyclists).

Summary:
This paper uses simulation to evaluate the use of truck arrival information to reduce container rehandles during the import container retrieval process by improving terminal operations. A variety of scenarios with different levels of truck information and various container bay configurations are modeled to explore how the information quality and bay configuration affect the magnitude of benefit.

Summary:
This paper quantifies the benefits to drayage trucks and container terminals from a data-sharing strategy designed to improve operations at the drayage truck-container terminal interface. This paper proposes a simple rule for using truck information to reduce container rehandling work and suggests a method for evaluating yard crane productivity and truck transaction time.

Summary:
A factor that influences transit ridership but has not received much attention from researchers is weather. This paper examines the effects of weather on bus ridership in Pierce County, Washington, for the years 2006–2008. Separate ordinary least squares regression models were estimated for each season, as weather conditions may have different effects depending on the time of year. Four weather variables were considered: wind, temperature, rain, and snow.

Summary:
As awareness of the vulnerability of isolated regions to natural disasters grows, the demand for efficient evacuation plans is increasing. However, isolated areas, such as islands, often have characteristics that make conventional methods, such as evacuation by private vehicle, impractical to infeasible. Mathematical models are conventional tools for evacuation planning.

Summary:
This life cycle assessment case study puts the supply chain contribution of transportation to greenhouse gas emissions in context with other contributors using American wheat grain as a representative product. Multiple locations, species and routes to market are investigated.

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Between 1998 and 2005, employment in the U.S. warehousing industry grew at a compound annual growth rate of 22.23%, and the number of establishments increased at compound annual growth rate of 9.48%. Over this same period of time, the price for transportation fuels increased dramatically and became much more volatile. In this paper we examine the microeconomic and macroeconomic forces that have enabled such rapid growth in the warehousing industry.

Summary:
Most of a delivery driver’s time is spent outside the vehicle, walking the last 50 feet to reach the delivery customers while the vehicle is stationary. However, little is known about the walking component of delivery routes, while most models and algorithms used for scheduling and planning urban freight vehicles focus solely on the driving component. This study fills this research gap by providing an empirical analysis of the role of walking in last-mile deliveries.

Summary:
As one of the nation’s first zero-emissions last-mile delivery pilots, the Seattle Neighborhood Delivery Hub served as a testbed for innovative sustainable urban logistics strategies on the ground in Seattle’s dense Uptown neighborhood.

Summary:
Evaluating health equity impacts of freight emissions is crucial for developing a sustainable and just freight system. It is a complex process that requires interdisciplinary knowledge, including transportation, environment, and public health. Full-chain simulation is an important approach for forecasting freight planning outcomes. However, a systematic framework that integrates available models in full-chain and is specifically designed for the freight sector has not been developed.

Summary:
Problem, research strategy, and findings The transportation sector is the largest contributor of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States. To articulate how cities may combat rising emissions, municipalities throughout the country have produced climate action and sustainability plans that outline strategies to reduce their carbon footprints from transportation.