Background and Overview
Boston Delivers is a pilot project that promoted sustainable methods of making neighborhood deliveries for local businesses in Allston, Brighton, and the surrounding area. Instead of motor vehicles, packages were delivered by electric cargo bikes. The Boston Transportation Department (BTD) partnered with Net Zero Logistics (Net Zero) to carry out this delivery service. Net Zero Logistics provided electric cargo bikes, made deliveries, and coordinated delivery logistics. The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (MassCEC) funded the pilot through their Accelerating Clean Transportation for All (ACT4All) Program. The pilot intended to test the policy implications of using right-sized delivery vehicles in urban environments, generate societal co-benefits from an efficient and sustainable mode for goods movement, and share learnings with a broad audience.
The city outlined four core goals as follows:
- Support Local Businesses,
- Reduce Urban Congestion,
- Improve Street Safety, and
- Reduce Pollution
Furthermore, the city created five learning objectives for the pilot program, as follows:
- Identify the policies, programs, and regulations that need to change to allow for ecargo bike delivery in the City of Boston;
- Test infrastructure changes needed to accommodate e-cargo bike delivery, including but not limited to e-cargo bike delivery zones, staging and sorting areas, parcel lockers, and other last-mile logistical needs;
- Measure the benefits of e-cargo bike delivery, including its impact on environmental, safety, and economic metrics;
- Understand the costs and feasibility of e-cargo bike delivery for different types of businesses;
- Share findings on e-cargo bike delivery and communicate to delivery service providers that the City of Boston is ready for e-cargo bikes to be used on a larger scale.
The 18-month pilot began in September 2023 and concluded in February 2025. The Boston team successfully recruited a logistics partner (Net Zero), onboarded and launched a new delivery service, and completed thousands of deliveries on behalf of underserved populations during the pilot period.
Between September 2023 and January 2025, 18,375 deliveries were made (approximately 20,000 units) with an estimated total of 5,881 cargo bicycle miles traveled and an estimated savings of 2,352.5 – 3,193.5 of kg CO2e (carbon emissions) avoided. By replacing larger vehicle trips, these outcomes directly contributed to the City’s goals of reducing neighborhood congestion and the chances for serious crashes, improving air quality through less tailpipe pollution, and showcasing new delivery methods that could benefit local businesses.
The pilot demonstrated that e-bike deliveries could be a feasible alternative to cars for specific delivery scenarios. Critically, Boston created a strong pilot framework that referenced big picture agency goals but focused on measurable pilot learning objectives. This approach allowed for a flexible and adaptive approach during pilot design and implementation, which made the pilot all the more successful. With an adaptive approach, the city was able to uncover important key learnings for future pilots.
While the critical elements of the pilot were achieved (launching a cargo bike operator, performing thousands of deliveries, and focusing on an underserved neighborhood), key learnings for future sustainable delivery programs from the pilot included:
- Flexibility in pilot design and implementation is critical during the execution of any pilot program and especially when working in close partnership with multiple organizations and companies.
- There is a need to coordinate and potentially partner with anchor clients or partners with significant volume ahead of launching a sustainable delivery program.
- For pilots or programs that require space for staging, identifying location(s) for these activities, and ensuring they can be launched expediently and permitted in a timely manner, is critical for success.
- When choosing a pilot geography, the use cases for e-bikes for last mile delivery should be evaluated in terms of existing neighborhood density, ease or lack thereof in making deliveries by large van or truck, and whether the neighborhood already has significant numbers of bike deliveries and a robust cycling culture.
- Organizers should understand the economics of programs that involve multiple nongovernmental and private sector organizations, including the significant start up (capital) costs required, and the importance of achieving economies of scale in delivery volume to ensure long-term financial health of a program.
- Broader citywide goals and policies around safety, congestion relief, and decarbonization can help center urban delivery goals in broader contexts (potentially allowing for additional funding, programmatic support, communication, better unit economics, etc.).
Overall, the goal of this pilot evaluation is to reflect on the City of Boston’s pilot experience and provide transparency about these learnings to a wide audience. We hope that the information below will provide real value for future City of Boston initiatives, delivery service providers and vendors, and cities nationwide as they continue to focus on ways to unlock greater efficiency in urban deliveries and realize a wide array of societal benefits.
Scope of Work
- Support design of pilot evaluation plan
- Provide feedback on an evaluation approach/framework, metrics, methodology, and data collection strategies.
- Deliverables: Written pilot evaluation plan, additional comments and participate in 1-2 meetings.
- Gather and perform data analysis
- Depending on availability and quality of data obtained, data will be processed to compute operational performance metrics as defined in Task 1 (e.g total VMT, deliveries per hour, etc). The UFL will work with NetZero Logistics to obtain data on deliveries performed over the study period.
- Incorporate available qualitative data. UFL to conduct interviews with NetZero Logistics and at least 3 participating businesses.
- Deliverables: Analyze data collected by the City of Boston.
- Report write-up
- UFL to summarize methodology and findings in report format in collaboration with Boston including key learnings, challenges, and future opportunities.
- UFL to provide outline and final content, while Boston will collaborate on graphics and layout for the final deliverable.
- Deliverables: Final report content including analysis with 1 major review cycle.
