Publications

Summary:
Micro-consolidation implementations and pairing with soft transportation modes offer practical, economic, environmental, and cultural benefits. Early implementations of micro consolidation practices were tested but cities need to understand their implications in terms of efficiency and sustainability. This study includes a research scan and proposes a typology of micro-consolidation practices.

Summary:
Cities need new load/unload space concepts to efficiently move freight, particularly as autonomous vehicles (both passenger and freight) become feasible. This research aims to: understand the importance of off-street commercial parking, understand how off-street facilities are managed, and determine whether off-street commercial parking is an underutilized resource for urban goods delivery.

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:
While several stakeholders in the private and public sectors are taking actions and drafting roadmaps to achieve sustainable urban freight goals, the urban freight ecosystem is a complex network of stakeholders, achieving such sustainability goals requires the collaboration and coordination between multiple agents. Researchers collected and synthesized views from both the private and public sectors on what is needed to sustainably deliver the last mile and identify roadblocks towards this goal.

Summary:
West Seattle (WS) is a part of the city of Seattle, Washington, but is located on a peninsula west of the Duwamish River. The West Seattle High-Rise Bridge serves as the primary connector between West Seattle and the rest of the city, carrying some 84,000 vehicles on average each day. On March 23, 2020, that high bridge was suddenly closed to all vehicle traffic for safety reasons due to greater-than-expected structural deterioration. The high bridge is now being repaired with a...

Summary:
While the number of deliveries has been increasing rapidly, infrastructure such as parking and building configurations has changed less quickly, given limited space and funds. This may lead to an imbalance between supply and demand, preventing the current resources from meeting the future needs of urban freight activities. This study aimed to discover the future delivery rates that would overflow the current delivery systems and find the optimal number of resources.

Summary:
Fundamental diagrams describe the relationship between speed, flow, and density for some roadway (or set of roadway) configuration(s). These diagrams typically do not reflect, however, information on how speed-flow relationships change as a function of exogenous variables such as curb configuration, weather or other exogenous, contextual information.

Summary:
At the time we are writing this article, hundreds of thousands of delivery vehicles are getting ready to hit the road and travel across U.S. cities to meet the highest peak of demand for ecommerce deliveries during Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and the Christmas holiday season. This mammoth fleet will not only add vehicle miles traveled through urban centers but also increase parking congestion, battling with other vehicles for available curb space.

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:
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:
Freight vehicle parking facilities at large urban freight traffic generators, such as urban retail malls, are often characterized by a high volume of vehicle arrivals and a poor parking supply infrastructure. Recurrent congestion of freight parking facilities generates environmental (e.g. pollution), economic (e.g. delays in deliveries), and freight and social (e.g. traffic) negative externalities.

Summary:
Although trucks move the largest volume and value of goods in urban areas, relatively little is known about their travel patterns and how the roadway network performs for trucks.

Summary:
Bike facilities like bike lanes, bike trails, and neighborhood greenways have been the backbone of Seattle’s bike planning policy with the goal of promoting active transportation, reducing car dependence, improving social equity, and eliminating bike accidents.

Summary:
Currently, knowledge of actual freight flows in the US is insufficient at a level of geographic resolution that permits corridor-level freight transportation analysis and planning. Commodity specific origins, destinations, and routes are typically estimated from four-step models or commodity flow models. At a sub-regional level, both of these families of models are built on important assumptions driven by the limited availability of data.