by Walther Ploos van Amstel
Commercial activity and supporting freight movements are essential to urban life. Unfortunately, urban freight has adverse effects on sustainability and requires innovative approaches to enhance the positive aspects and minimize the negative ones. There is a common understanding among practitioners that the negative impacts of urban freight can be alleviated with better knowledge about the …
Business model innovation (BMI) is an essential but challenging process potentially hampered by obstruction and confusion. Despite its significance, BMI is an underexplored topic in research on urban freight transport. A new paper reviews the existing literature and reinterprets five cases of attempted BMI in the Swedish urban freight transport sector by studying two examples …
Automation represents the next big buzz in transport and promises many benefits for society, including more efficient use of space, energy, and time and reduced costs. Accordingly, an impressive range of autonomous vehicles has been introduced, covering personal and goods transport applications. In particular, in response to the global pandemic linked to COVID-19, autonomous vehicles …
A new paper assesses how various ways of organizing last-mile logistics impact resource utilization and, in turn, opportunities for consolidating goods. The paper combines a conceptualization of resourcing and consolidation from the literature with an analysis of contemporary last-mile logistics options in the Swedish retail market. Based on the analysis of three forms of last-mile …
A New Ph.D. thesis by Dávid Lajos Sárdi of Budapest University of Technology and Economics looked at hubs for city logistics in Budapest (Hungary). First, he looked at urban concentrated sets of delivery locations (CSDLs). Then, he presented the application of a new consolidation-based concept to the city logistics system of the CSDLs and the …
The rapid growth in e-commerce volumes, coupled with customer expectations of faster, more flexible, and cheaper parcel deliveries, is increasing the pressure on retailers to design the most efficient delivery network. Collection-and-delivery points (CDPs aggregate demand for both forward and return flows and help minimize additional tours in the case of failed deliveries. In a …
Incorporating ICT into restaurants has altered the customer-restaurant relationship, especially with customers who prefer to order remotely. In 2019, the online food delivery sector surpassed, for the first time, the barrier of 100 trillion US dollars worldwide, maintaining a sharp upward trend. During the last few years, the number of digital platforms offering allegedly environmentally …
Delivery vehicle drivers are experiencing increasing challenges in finding available curb space to park in urban areas, increasing cruising instances for parking, and parking in unauthorized spaces. Policies traditionally used to reduce cruising for parking for passenger vehicles, such as parking fees and congestion pricing, are not effective at changing delivery drivers’ travel and parking …
In May 2023, new H2020 research opportunities are open for zero-emission e-commerce and freight delivery and return choices by retailers, consumers, and local authorities. The total indicative budget for the topic is euro 6 million. Projects are expected to contribute to all of the following outcomes: Better understanding of customers’ willingness and motivations to choose …
How can we boost out-of-home deliveries? This could be a promising question for those who still believe out-of-home deliveries (click-and-collect) are more sustainable. The ‘last mile’ of delivery is the journey from the depot to our front door. Most last-mile journeys are taken by delivery vans, meaning each delivery contributes to air pollution and congestion. …