by Walther Ploos van Amstel
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 …
PostNL’s first-quarter 2026 figures are a wake-up call for everyone in e-commerce. Parcel volumes fell 7.1%. This is the new reality. The party is over. The years of double-digit e-commerce growth are behind us for the most part — yet the sector is still deep in denial. Five years have passed since the Covid boom …
While Dutch cities spent the past year fine-tuning zero-emission zones and exemption regimes, London opened a different front. In March, the GLA and Transport for London published a progress update on the London Logistics Plan, due in late 2026 — the city’s first attempt in years to treat logistics not as a nuisance to be …
Here are some of the most notable international city logistics items from recent weeks and months: UPS restructures its UK last mile. UPS wants to reduce its UK workforce by transferring last-mile delivery to outside couriers, which would significantly change the labor landscape for legacy parcel carriers; arguably the clearest sign yet that the integrator …
Speed is the holy grail of food delivery. Platforms like Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Just Eat push hard on short delivery times, with real consequences for riders: time pressure in dense urban traffic, and elevated exposure to crashes and near-misses. New research from TU Delft (Kavta, Sharif Azadeh and de Almeida Correia, published in Transport …
Fifteen months after New York City introduced congestion pricing, commercial fleets have clearly adapted. New telematics data from Altitude by Geotab, based on more than 50,000 commercial vehicle trips, shows that operators have responded not by avoiding Manhattan, but by using their vehicles more efficiently. The most striking finding is a 15% increase in operational …
Urban freight is competing for an increasingly scarce resource: curb space. The growth of e-commerce, grocery deliveries, on-demand services and ride-hailing has intensified pressure on city streets, while many cities continue to redesign public space primarily for pedestrians, cyclists and public transport. The result is a growing mismatch between freight demand and curb availability, leading …