by Walther Ploos van Amstel
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 …
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 …