Why Goods Movement Matters

Many cities are taking actions today to make their streets more livable and to give space back to pedestrians. Such actions aim to create a more comprehensive transportation network for everyone, requiring the urban streetscape – roads, curbs and sidewalks –to serve automobiles, pedestrians, cyclists, surface transit and parked vehicles. Many of the interventions to make cities more livable are warranted and should be welcomed after decades of auto-centric policies.

The urban street network, including the curb, is critical to goods movement. However, the current emphasis on ​“livability” and its components – such as bike lanes, bus stops and bike docking stations – ignores this, creating many challenges for trucks as they attempt to deliver goods. Trucks must navigate through congested streets where they are generally given lower priority; they struggle to find access to the curb to unload their goods, encouraging them to continue to drive and cause even more congestion or forcing them to double-park.

Since more street space is allocated to pedestrians, cyclists and transit, city streets are often far narrower than the wider highways that connect them to and serve the surrounding metropolitan area. As a result, urban freight distribution in cities primarily relies on small trucks, consequently increasing the number of vehicles on urban streets and exacerbating the inefficiencies in deliveries. Making matters worse, many of these trucks, both large and small, are only partially loaded or, even worse, empty.

Buildings

The movement of goods extends beyond the curb. Buildings are the origin and destination of almost every freight trip. The capacity of buildings to effectively accommodate freight has ripple effects on other aspects of urban goods movement. Much of what happens at the building line is physical – the size and number of loading docks, off-hour delivery space and vertical freight (elevator) capacity. Many cities are empowered to mandate specific physical requirements through zoning and building codes or provide other incentives for voluntary action.

The configuration of a building to handle freight – having sufficiently sized loading docks, freight elevators, secure off-hour holding areas and on-site storage – can significantly influence the number of trips, when trips occur, the durations of deliveries and their impact on the street network. Many older cities are saddled with buildings that are inadequate to serve the demands placed on them today. In the cases where a building has a loading dock, its facilities are often outmoded, not built to accommodate higher volumes and larger vehicles.

The impact of infill construction and reduction in square footage per employee are also challenging goods movement in older cities as they grow taller and even denser. Multi-tenanted buildings generate far more deliveries than single tenanted ones. In addition, multi-tenanted buildings such as offices and shopping centers often do not have shared internal logistics staff, increasing vehicle dwell time while the delivery takes place. This results in in on-street vehicle queueing for the loading bay, and related noise, pollution and safety impacts for local residents.

The Environment

Moving goods, similar to transporting passengers, can produce noxious emissions and noise. These environmental impacts are felt more acutely in cities with dense populations because residents directly experience the high volumes of goods that must be moved.

The freight industry produces approximately 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the production of most of which is concentrated in urban areas. This figure is expected to increase fourfold by 2050.¹¹ The relatively recent trend of e-commerce has exacerbated the problem by increasing the frequency of truck trips. While cities have made major strides in improving their environmental impacts over the past fifty years, operators and policy makers must consider innovative policies to reduce the number of freight trips and how to reduce emissions caused by outdated vehicles, inefficient sizes, slow speeds or congestion, and idling.

Modern cities are also embracing a more diverse mix of land uses, comingling manufacturing, commercial and residential districts/neighborhoods. These changes are making neighborhoods more sensitive to noise. Activities associated with moving goods – idling of diesel truck engines and the act of loading and off-loading goods – are typically major sources of noise. Because excessive noise can deteriorate the overall quality of life for city dwellers, noise impacts also limit goods movement strategies that attempt to shift deliveries to overnight periods.

People and Technology

The consumer’s growing expectation for on-demand deliveries as further exacerbated the constraints that our goods movement system has been experiencing for decades. Through e-commerce – the ability to purchase goods online via laptop, tablet or smartphone – consumers have radically changed how they interact with retailers. Consumers want their goods to arrive frequently and quickly and expect the ability to check for a nearby product’s availability. Consequently, cities are grappling with conflicting priorities: residents don’t want more trucks on the streets; don’t want to hear them; and don’t want to sit behind them in traffic. However, technology has enabled us to demand more goods and, at the same time, request increasingly more frequent deliveries.

Just-in-time deliveries are also the norm for many commercial establishments. Retailers, restaurants and hotels in urban centers typically are pressured by high rents and the desire to maximize the revenue generating square footage. This results in less space to store goods, which requires a need for more frequent deliveries.

Today, there are few incentives for residents or commercial establishments to reduce the number of deliveries they receive. And although technology has enabled more orders to be placed, it has not yet effectively streamlined the delivery system. Furthermore, residential deliveries are often not successfully delivered on the first attempt resulting in added congestion and costs for shippers. If e-commerce continues to rise and consumer expectations do not change, both congestion and unnecessary costs will continue to increase.

• Increase truck parking and loading areas by adapting existing street and loading zone design. A number of physical changes can be made, including widening sidewalks, eliminating vehicular parking, repurposing curb space for loading zones, using textured pavement to delineate and designate shared use for deliveries (San Francisco, USA), providing longer parking/loading spaces and/or multi-space meters (Washington D.C., USA), and increasing the size of loading zones to 100 feet (30 meters).
• Rethink preferential treatments for transit. One strategy is to create a ​“floating bus lane” instead of a curbside bus lane; this design permits direct curb access for local deliveries (New York City, USA). New types of delivery bays, such as the ​“Lincoln” and ​“Half-Lincoln” used in Paris, allow commercial vehicles to park fully or partially on the sidewalk, which creates curbside access that does not interrupt bus traffic.
• Introduce pedestrian and bicycle-friendly means of delivery. Non-motorized modes of delivery, such as cargo cycles, pose less of a risk for pedestrians and bicyclists than large trucks or delivery vans. Since they travel at slower speeds, produce fewer emissions and generate less noise, they foster a more livable urban environment.
• Construct urban consolidation centers (UCCs). UCCs are collective receiving points strategically located near or en route to city centers where trucks drop off goods rather than going to each store in the city center. From the UCC, electric vans and cargo cycles can be used for the last mile delivery, thereby reducing congestion, emissions and noise, and improving safety for pedestrians and bicyclists. However, the high cost of urban land typically requires local subsidies and may result in a lack of profitability.

Buildings

• Implement an off-hour delivery program. Diverting truck trips to overnight hours, which requires receivers to change behavior and, in some cases, reconfigure their buildings to accept deliveries without staff. This program can be voluntary or mandatory required by a municipality.
• Eliminate truck trips for municipal solid waste. Strategies to consolidate trips, reduce the volume of MSW and/or divert trips to other ways. One example is pneumatic tubes, which would be difficult to retrofit in existing buildings add significant cost to new developments.
• Rethink the design of urban buildings to accommodate modern trucks and delivery volumes. Cities should include the private real estate sector (developers), public planning and economic development agencies in a process to develop enhanced building codes for off-street parking and loading facilities. Zoning and building codes can be used to incentivize consideration of freight demands in both new construction and redevelopment projects. This is a low-cost approach compared to retroactive upgrades to existing infrastructure.
• Redesign insufficient or outdated loading docks to accommodate modern trucks. While it is not possible in many cases to retrofit buildings to accommodate changes in truck fleets, there have been instances where it is feasible. Cities should survey buildings with outmoded facilities and determine whether retrofitting is possible, including options for creating adequate setbacks from streets so trucks do not interfere with traffic flow when unloading. Financial incentives to encourage these retrofits are also an option, including property tax rebates, to help defer the costs of the improvements.
• Implement joint procurement and common internal logistics operations in large and multi-tenanted buildings and Delivery and Servicing Plans. Joint procurement initiatives between tenants, as well as common logistics operations in the loading bay with shared staff able to receive goods on behalf of all tenants, have the potential to reduce the number of suppliers used and thus vehicle deliveries. A pilot project in Oslo, STRAIGHTSOL, demonstrated how automatic data collection and information sharing could enable more efficient shopping center management.¹³Delivery and Servicing Plans designed to manage the entire building (an approach devised by Transport for London) can also reduce the negative effects of urban freight deliveries at specific buildings.
• Require appointment-based systems for deliveries. Booking systems streamline deliveries to allow for efficient operations of loading docks. A successful example is MobileDOCK, which has been used widely in Sydney and Melbourne. Benefits include reductions in congestion and pollution, improved turnaround times, and transparency for all actors in the supply chain. Such systems are particularly important in dense urban areas, including shopping centers, markets, sports arenas, tourism/cultural sites, and residential towers.
• Promote the accommodation of new types of ​“logistics hotels” in urban areas. Sogaris, a real estate development company owned by the municipality of Paris, is currently building a 35,000 sq m logistics multi story terminal within the city boundaries (opening planned for 2017). This building will also accommodate office activities and sport facilities. The new Paris zoning ordinance (2016) identifies land parcels that will be able to accommodate logistics activities in the future.

Environment

• Adopt strict national (central government) emission and fuel efficiency standards. One of the most effective strategies for reducing truck emissions is national emissions and fuel efficiency standards. National standards impose the same costs on everyone, thus avoiding the potential negative competitive effects of local regulations such as LEZs.
• Create low emission zones in dense urban centers. These geographically limited zones are located in the core of metropolitan areas where vehicles that produce a lot of pollution are either banned or required to pay a toll that varies based on ambient air quality to enter. Tougher restrictions on vehicular emissions have resulted in a reduction of truck trips, thereby reducing pollution and noise, improving the quality of urban life and decreasing traffic congestion.
• Separate noxious freight activity from conflicting land uses whenever possible. Zoning could consider the impacts of some of these uses and create buffers between residential/commercial and industrial activities. For example, Chicago’s planned manufacturing districts prohibit residential development.
• Transition to alternatively fueled vehicles. Electric vehicles could offer a promising means for improving the efficiency and performance of the urban freight system, especially in conjunction with urban consolidation centers. A successful example that has helped to replace and improve the emissions of older diesel trucks is the Hunts Point Clean Trucks Program in the South Bronx in New York City. This program offers rebate incentives for truck owners to use advanced transportation technologies and alternative fuels.
• Evaluate non-road modes for deliveries. Although marine and rail options won’t replace the last mile delivery, they bring goods closer to the urban core and could help to reduce longer-haul truck trips throughout the metropolitan area. Researchers are also exploring the potential role that urban railway hubs could play in last mile logistics in London and how much freight could be shifted from truck to rail Los Angeles.
• Implement anti-idling programs. A number of programs have been implemented in the U.S. to reduce pollution produced by idling. These programs utilize a combination technologies, economic incentives, regulations, and education.
• Require comprehensive environmental impact mitigation programs at major freight hubs. For example, the Clean Air Action Plan at the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach included a requirement to phase in drayage trucks with the cleanest available technology. The turnover of the fleet was the major factor in reducing PM emissions by 75% in a period of four years.

People and Technology

• Consolidate home deliveries by encouraging alternate residential delivery sites. Home deliveries are inefficient; small packages are delivered one-by-one to homes and apartments. Establishing neighborhood pickup points (PPs) or automated parcel systems (APS) – locker banks in public locations – can reduce truck trips by delivering to fewer destinations and avoiding missed deliveries.
• Educate businesses on receiver-led delivery consolidation programs. Provide examples on how receiver-led delivery consolidation programs could be structured and the financial benefits that would accrue to their businesses. Shippers can combine their deliveries at the receiver’s request: one supplier delivers goods to another supplier who will make the final delivery.
• Enact proactive Freight Demand Management (FDM) strategies. The receivers of deliveries directly influence when and how deliveries are made. FDM initiatives seek to change the behavior of goods recipients, modifying demand at commercial establishments and households by altering the frequency, timing and mode of deliveries. Strategies include off-hour delivery programs, staggered pick-up/deliver programs and receiver-led consolidation programs.
• Facilitate the development of new tools to assist the consolidation of shipments and more efficient use of urban streets. By openly sharing data and holding application design competitions emerging applications have enabled on-demand requests for larger scale shipments. For instance, Cargomatic matches shippers to carriers with available space on a truck, improving truck load utilization factors and reducing extra miles travelled and empty trips.
• Encourage ​“on-demand” passenger for-hire-vehicle services to include goods movement. Many of these vehicles are already on the road and have idle cargo capacity that could be used to eliminate existing trips. UberRush and Zipments are examples of two services that have simplified the process of requesting these on-demand movements.
• Introduce a receiver charge for deliveries. This will encourage receivers to decrease the number of trips generated by goods movement and increase their store space to house larger inventories.
• Raise the profile of goods movement by engaging freight partnerships and networks. Long-term partnerships between representatives from the public and private sectors are invaluable to solving urban freight problems. Partnerships provide an opportunity for knowledge sharing and bringing together varying perspectives.