by Walther Ploos van Amstel
Zero-emission zones are coming, electric vans and trucks are ramping up, and by 2030 the tailpipe problem of urban logistics will largely be solved. Good news? Yes. Job done? Not even close. Because a battery-electric van still blocks the bike lane, still idles on the sidewalk, still competes for scarce urban space. Swapping diesel for …
Where shoppers once had to find a website, search it, and click through endless steps before ordering, social media like TikTok and AI are now taking over. Browse any trade journal, and you will find the same starting point again and again: how do we organize parcel delivery to keep pace with the slower e-commerce …
Amsterdam is quietly building one of Europe’s most interesting experiments in urban freight: moving household and commercial waste over its canals instead of through its streets. What started as a modest pilot in the Red Light District in 2021 (electric barges collecting garbage bags twice a week, fed by small electric carts from the surrounding …
Cities like Amsterdam, Utrecht, London and Paris were built on water, yet largely stopped using it as a means of transport in the twentieth century. With urban densification, climate adaptation and zero-emission targets converging, water deserves a mature place in the urban mobility mix; not as a tourist sideshow, but as a functional, affordable and …
Every city depends on goods to function, yet urban planning scholarship pays them little attention. That is the sobering conclusion of a systematic review by Heleen Buldeo Rai (VUB), Bram Kin (HAN), and Paul Buijs (University of Groningen), published in Cities (2026) and developed within the SPRONG LILS collaboration. The authors reviewed 82 articles from …
Cities regulate urban freight as if every street and every delivery were the same. New research from the University of Seville, published in the European Transport Research Review (Muñuzuri et al., 2026), shows why that approach fails — and what micro-regulation could look like instead. The researchers studied 104 delivery operations across 22 streets in …
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 …
Cities want to steer city logistics. Zero-emission zones, traffic filters, loading bays, construction logistics: the policy ambitions are big. But there is one awkward problem. Cities barely know what is actually happening on their streets. While passenger mobility has been monitored for decades with traffic models, smart card data and parking permits, freight and service …
For many years, Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs) focused primarily on moving people. Walking, cycling, public transport, and private cars dominated the discussion, while urban freight was often reduced to a few pages on deliveries or low-emission zones. The third edition of the Guidelines for Developing and Implementing a Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan marks a …
Books about waste are usually written by policy people, consultants, or journalists. Simon Paré-Poupart, Trash! A Garbageman’s Story is written by a man who has hauled nearly 70,000 tons of it over 20 years on the streets of Montreal. That difference matters. Paré-Poupart writes from the bottom rung of the labor market; “you can’t fall …