by Walther Ploos van Amstel
Online shopping isn’t creating more congestion – and it won’t do that even when the number of web-store deliveries doubles to 200 million in 2020. But that doesn’t stop my neighbors from complaining all over social media about the increasing number of delivery vans in the street.
Countless books and articles have been written about urban distribution centers, logistics decoupling points, city hubs and urban consolidation centers. Every self-respecting European city has been the scene of such initiatives – the one more successful than the other, but all highly subsidized in any case. What can we learn from those initiatives? The best …
More and more companies are offering their customers delivery options. CoolBlue offers “Ordered today, delivered tonight” service, for example. In the construction sector, it’s: “Ordered today, delivered to the site between 7 and 9 tomorrow morning” – unless you’d rather pick up your package at the pick-up point yourself tonight. Agreed is agreed. Customers expect precision-guided …