by Walther Ploos van Amstel
Fleet electrification is usually told as a technology story: replace the diesel van, optimize the route, tick the zero-emission box. Hyunji Chang’s paper in Mobilities tells a different story. Sustainable last-mile delivery is not simply implemented. It is assembled, day by day, by the people who do the work. Chang studied PostNL’s rollout of light …
The commercial vehicle industry is at an inflection point. A new factbook from BloombergNEF, produced with the Smart Freight Centre, the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, and Traton, offers the clearest picture yet of how fast electric trucking is scaling, and where the friction still lies. For transport and logistics managers weighing fleet …
Europe’s transition to zero-emission mobility is well underway, but progress is uneven — and without solid data, that unevenness is easy to miss. That’s the gap Transport & Mobility Leuven (TML) is closing for the European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association (ACEA): building on an earlier gap analysis, TML is now developing a set of key performance …
Tanaka, Sakai, Hyodo and Kodera (Journal of Transport Geography, 2026) tackle a persistent gap in city logistics: local governments are typically responsible for zoning, curbside management and local infrastructure, yet they have far less experience and data on freight than on passenger transport, and struggle to know which freight issues to prioritize or how. The …
DHL, together with Chinese autonomous-vehicle startup Zelostech, has put fully electric, driverless vehicles into operation to move goods between hubs, sorting centers and warehouses. At its Advanced Regional Center (ARC) in Singapore, this marks the first DHL site globally where such a vehicle has moved from innovation trial to daily operational use. The focus isn’t …
A master’s thesis from Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) offers a useful corrective for fleet managers who view electric truck adoption primarily as a procurement decision: pick a Battery Electric Truck (BET), sign the purchase order, and that’s it. Boris Leferink’s research, “The Real Decisions Behind Electric Truck Procurement” (supervised by Prof. Lóri Tavasszy, …
A study in Transportation Research Part E quantifies something every delivery driver already knows: finding a place to park is often harder than finding a route. Giacomo Dalla Chiara and colleagues (University of Washington, University of Groningen) analyzed GPS data from a beverage distributor’s delivery operations in downtown Seattle (472 manifests, over 2,400 trips) to …
The Horizon Europe project NEXTLOGIC has released its first major deliverable (D1.1), Urban Logistics Challenges, a report that combines a state-of-the-art review with real-world benchmarking and primary data collection across the project’s eight EU Mission Cities: Aarhus, Bergamo, Differdange, Dublin, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, The Hague and Wroclaw. Coordinated by the University of Luxembourg and led on …
A new systematic literature review in Transport Reviews by Oliver Olmedo, Otgondulam Boldbaatar, Carla Tejada, Travis Fried, Paul Buijs, Sarah Dennis-Bauer and Anne Goodchild asks a deceptively simple question: when urban freight scholars talk about “stakeholders,” who exactly do they mean, and who gets left out? The team screened 6,419 articles, narrowing them to 54 …
The Horizon Europe project GREEN-LOG has released its Policy Recommendations and Strategic Roadmap, a framework designed to help European cities transition toward zero-emission last-mile logistics. Co-funded by the EU with a contribution of roughly €6.3 million, the project ran from January 2023 to June 2026 and was based on Living Lab pilots across five European …