Publications

Summary:
Boston Delivers was an 18-month pilot project (running September 2023 through February 2025) led by the Boston Transportation Department in partnership with Net Zero Logistics and funded by MassCEC through the ACT4All program. The project tested the use of electric cargo bikes for neighborhood deliveries, aiming to reduce congestion, improve air quality, and support local businesses by replacing car and van trips with more sustainable, right-sized vehicles.

Summary:
This study introduces a first-of-a-kind modeling framework to evaluate the equity impacts of last-mile ecommerce delivery in U.S. cities. Analyzing data across 41 metropolitan areas, the research finds that populations of color experience significantly higher exposure to delivery traffic—about 35% more than white populations—despite ordering fewer packages. The framework helps planners assess baseline equity performance and test urban freight strategies.

Summary:
Urban freight denotes vehicle and commodity flows in an urban environment. These flows depend on a complex set of relationships among various stakeholders. In the last decades, urban freight has experienced an incredible pace of evolution, which has occurred due to various technological factors. One example is the ubiquity of internet access and the advance in information technology, leading to e-commerce adoption.

Summary:
Urban distribution centers (UDCs) are opening at unprecedented rates to meet rising home delivery demand. The trend has raised concerns over the equity and environmental justice implications of ecommerce’s negative externalities. However, little research exists connecting UDC location to the concentration of urban freight-derived air pollution among marginalized populations.

Summary:
The distribution of goods and services in North American cities has conventionally relied on diesel-powered internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles. Recent developments in electromobility have provided an opportunity to reduce some of the negative externalities generated by urban logistics systems. Cargo e-bikes — electric cycles specially designed for cargo transportation — represent an alternative environmentally friendly and safer mode for delivering goods and services in urban areas.

Summary:
The last mile of delivery is undergoing major changes, experiencing new demand and new challenges. The rise in urban deliveries amid the societal impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically affected urban logistics. The level of understanding is increasing as cities and companies pilot strategies that pave the way for efficient urban freight practices.

Summary:
Quantifying the relationship between the number and types of truck trips generated by different land uses provides information useful for traffic demand analyses, forecasting models, and a general understanding of the factors that affect truck mobility. This project evaluated data collection methodologies for determining truck trip generation rates by studying a specific kind of establishment.

Summary:
Smart growth design, a strategy for improving the quality of life in urban areas, has typically focused on the areas of passenger travel, land use and nonmotorized transport adoption. The role of goods movement is often ignored in discussions of smart growth. This article reports on National Cooperative Freight Research Program (NCFRP) Report 24, which addresses the importance of the relationship between smart growth and goods movement.

Summary:
This report examines the relationship between Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and safety from an urban perspective. Existing urban ITS systems are either system-level or site-level applications. System-level ITS, such as freeway management systems or traffic signal networks, address safety concerns only indirectly. These systems are designed to improve traffic flows and thus indirectly reduce collisions caused by congestion.

Summary:
While recent urban planning efforts have focused on the management of growth into developed areas, the research community has not examined the impacts of these development patterns on urban goods movement. Successful implementation of growth strategies has multiple environmental and social benefits but also raises the demand for intra-urban goods movement, potentially increasing conflicts between modes of travel and worsening air quality.

Summary:
There is growing pressure in cities to unlock the potential of every public infrastructure element as density and demand for urban resources increase. Despite their historical role as providing access to land uses for freight and servicing, alleys have not been studied as a resource in modern freight access planning. The authors developed a replicable data collection method to build and maintain an alley inventory and operations study focused on commercial vehicles.

Summary:
Research has established a potential to reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) by replacing passenger travel for shopping with delivery service, and a few studies have indicated CO2 emissions can also be reduced. However, that research has mostly focused on urban locations and has not addressed criteria pollutants.

Summary:
Industry in Seattle often talks about how they are facing their own kind of gentrification. Rising property values, encroaching pressure for different land uses, and choking transportation all loom as reasons for industrial businesses to relocate out of the city. This research explores this phenomenon of industrial gentrification through a case study of Seattle’s most prominent industrial area: the SODO (“South Of Downtown”) neighborhood.

Summary:
In an age of expanding online commerce, is home delivery greener than sending full truckloads of goods to stores and then customers driving to them? A detailed regional study finds compelling answers. Readers who were teenagers in the 1980s may remember driving to a Sam Goody store to buy music. You probably also remember your disappointment when sometimes the tape or CD wasn’t in stock when you arrived. Perhaps you returned to your car and headed for Tower Records to...

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.