by Walther Ploos van Amstel
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 …
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 …