by Walther Ploos van Amstel
In response to changing consumer markets, retailers are moving to an “omnichannel model,” combining inventory in the physical store with a webshop and home delivery and installation. Delivering and installing heavier products at consumers’ homes is a specialty in the home delivery market like furniture, white goods, and electronics delivery. Dutch web stores deliver consumers …
Professionals refer to the ‘theory’ of disappearing traffic in the recent debate about major traffic interventions. After traffic interventions, traffic magically evaporates. What do we know about this theory? A study (by Cairns, Hass-Klau, and Goodwin from 1998) sought to identify possible case studies of circumstances where road space had been reallocated, whether due to …
New research by lobby group Transport and Environment debunks carmakers’ claims that Euro 7 standards won’t significantly improve the quality. The truck industry organization ACEA says: ‘Significant progress has been made in the EU on reducing air pollution from vehicles, under the current Euro 6/VI standards. Euro 7 is unlikely to make much more of …
Cities are setting up pilots to make parts of their cities car-free. How do we prevent businesses from falling 3:0 behind right from the start? The Amsterdam Weesperstraat is closed to car traffic for six weeks. It is a pilot to see how the city can become car-free. What can the business community do now …
Genuine innovations in city logistics are about sharing. Sharing capacities, vehicles, data, energy, and people. That should start happening in zero-emission city hubs, local neighborhood hubs, and with waterborne transport. Simple, right? But, those innovations often stumble over the distribution of joys and burdens. The public-private revenue models behind them are not obvious (and profitable). …
Urban traffic attributed to commercial and industrial transportation largely affects living standards in cities due to external factors like pollution and congestion. To counter this, smart cities deploy technologies such as digital twins (DT)s to achieve sustainability. Research suggests that DTs can be beneficial in optimizing the physical systems they are linked with. The concept …
Small transport companies that want to go electric will never succeed. But should we want them to? That was an exciting question at a workshop on grid congestion with companies offering renewable energy. The Dutch National Charging Infrastructure Agenda has found numerous solutions to grid congestion. However, those measures cost money and require scarce materials …
Local authorities have five roles in city logistics: regulate and enforce, facilitate, stimulate, coordinate, and experiment. What eight elements should be in every city logistics plan? Those plans should provide clear guidance for companies in, for example, construction, facilities, parcel, service logistics, and circular flows; what is in store for them? What problems do you …
Though less than 4% of vehicles on the road are trucks, it is estimated that they are responsible for 27% of road transport’s CO2 emissions. As urbanization grows, absolute population numbers and population density continue to rise in cities. Consequently, urban commercial transport is also increasing, exacerbating congestion and harmful emissions. Action is needed to …
