by Walther Ploos van Amstel
A new McKinsey report by Matthias Kässer, Tobias Schneiderbauer and Henrik Becker delivers a sobering reality check for anyone tracking freight decarbonization in Europe: despite nine years of model launches and more than 45 zero-emission (ZE) truck models now on the market, new registrations of ZE trucks remained below 5 percent as of 2025. That’s …
A new study in Case Studies on Transport Policy by Annette Rondaij, Bram Kin, Hans Quak, and colleagues (LiLS partners: Dutch TNO, HAN, and BUAS) offers a timely corrective to the electrification-first narrative that dominates urban freight policy. While battery electric vehicles remain the default answer to decarbonizing city logistics, the authors argue that measures …
Every year, tens of billions of parcels move across Europe, and the price keeps falling. That sounds like good news. But there’s a lesson from an older industry (trucking) that we’re at risk of ignoring. In the 1990s and 2000s, Europe opened up road freight to competition, creating one single market. Prices dropped, trucks were …
Three-quarters of Britons have picked up a parcel from an out-of-home (OOH) point in the past year rather than at their door. That’s the headline from new research by Citizens Advice, the UK consumer watchdog, based on a survey of over 4,500 parcel users. It confirms what the sector has felt coming for a while: …
While PostEurop spends its lobbying efforts arguing the parcel market is “already competitive,” the real competitive battle has quietly moved up a layer, to platforms such as Sendcloud, nShift, Packlink, Parcel International and Seven Senders. These platforms now sit between the merchant and the carrier, holding the rate comparisons, the routing rules, the tracking data, …
De Fietskoerier and Cargo Velo are merging. The combined company becomes Belgium’s largest bicycle courier operation: roughly 50 (part-time) couriers on the road, projected revenue well above one million euros, and a combined distance cycled of more than 250,000 kilometers a year. Two pioneers of sustainable city logistics are turning into a logistics player of …
Amsterdam’s Wallen district is a policy laboratory whether we plan it that way or not: narrow streets, fragile quay walls, dense hospitality, and a constant stream of vehicles nobody particularly wants there. For years, “lighter vehicles in the historic center” has been a slogan more than a practice. Oscar Circulair, a waste and resource collector …
At the WCTR conference in Toulouse, we discussed the role of city logistics in 15-minute cities. The discussion started, as it always does, with data: what do we need to know to provide the right solutions? Counting transport movements is nice. It is not sufficient. The 15-minute city promises daily needs within a short walk …
Everyone is looking at the truck in fleet electrification. Range anxiety, battery chemistry, charging speed. These dominate the conversation. And they matter. But a recent industry-wide review by Joost Commandeur (TU Delft / Shell Global Solutions), together with Bart De Schutter and Neil Yorke-Smith, mapped 91 digital solutions across site energy management, fleet scheduling, and …
European cities have no shortage of pilots for cleaner and smarter urban freight. The real challenge is turning promising experiments into lasting logistics solutions. The GREEN-LOG project offers useful lessons on how to do that. Its new Policy Recommendations brochure brings together three years of experience from Living Labs in Athens, Barcelona, Flanders, Oxfordshire and …