by Walther Ploos van Amstel
In 2018 Ikea made a bold pledge. By 2025, the company will deliver every item worldwide by electric vehicle. It started with a full switch to EVs in five cities: New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Amsterdam, and Shanghai by 2020.
Deutsche Post stops testing several new delivery technologies, says CEO Frank Appel in an interview in Tagesspiegel. In the foreseeable future, no drones will be used and no parcels will be delivered in the trunk of cars and behind the house door. Consumer interest is not big enough for profitable use of the new technology.
The UK ‘Future of mobility’ report looks out to 2040. It looks at the whole transport system – considering the users and goods. It considers new opportunities and the implications of current trends. It builds four plausible future scenario’s to help decision makers think about the future.
Despite governments’ best efforts, traffic is getting worse in many cities, and urban mobility has become increasingly complex. Congestion carries health consequences, in the form of accidents and air pollution. Demographic trends will accentuate today’s strains, which aren’t solely about the movement of people. E-commerce is also growing fast, adding to the demand for urban commercial …
Last-mile delivery has created a continuing flow of issues that couriers and logistics companies have been working on for a long time. Recently, retailers have taken the issue into their own hands in attempts to ease the last mile headache themselves.
Amazon presented good results for 2018 despite increasing cost of fulfillment. Cost, as a percentage of sales, increased from 21% in 2017 to 24% in 2018. In 2011 fulfillment cost were only 11% of sales. US market is profitable, international not yet.
Many European countries are failing to comply with international and European standards on air quality. Moreover, many governments have failed to take effective action to improve air quality and hence to protect their citizens’ health.
UPS has joined the coalition of the world’s largest consumer product companies and international recycling company TerraCycle to unveil an innovative reusable and returnable system for managing consumer product packaging. The system, called Loop, will be tested in Paris and New York as a first step toward full implementation in consumer markets.
The rise of e-commerce activities increases the complexity of the last-mile of parcel deliveries and its impacts on the environment and quality of life. A new paper proposes a method to assess alternative strategies for the last-mile of parcel deliveries, in terms of social, environmental, and economic impacts and presents for a postal company Rio de …
In the last few years, the issue of the location of logistics activities emerged in the literature, in Europe, and in the US, especially from the perspective of logistics spatial dynamics as logistics sprawl. These issues of spatial dynamics question urban policies because they underline the lack of interest in freight in the planning process.