by Walther Ploos van Amstel
A paper presented at City Logistics 2025 (Winkelmann, Nandakumar, Spruijtenburg, de Bok — TNO and TU Delft) puts a number on something many city logistics practitioners have suspected but rarely quantified: zero-emission zones (ZEZs) can improve air quality in the city center while quietly shifting the burden onto poorer neighborhoods nearby. The Netherlands has committed …
A new paper presented at IPIC 2026 (Errami, Hashemi-Petroodi, Puchinger, Klibi) tackles a problem central to the Physical Internet vision for cities: how do you actually get competing logistics providers and public transport authorities to share infrastructure, not just talk about it? The model, developed under the EU MODALSHIFT project and tested on a real …
City halls love to talk about parcels. The white delivery van has become the poster child of urban freight policy: hubs for e-commerce, regulation for e-commerce, working groups on e-commerce. Research from José Holguín-Veras and colleagues (City Logistics 2025, Boston) suggests we may be aiming at the wrong target. The researchers compared business-to-business (B2B) and …
The complete proceedings of the Thirteenth International Conference on City Logistics (11–13 June 2025, Penang, Malaysia) are now available in open access in Transportation Research Procedia, Volume 98 (2026). All 41 contributions, free to download. Urban freight has become a core issue in urban planning. Cities struggle with congestion, emissions, safety and energy use, while …
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 …
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 …
On 1 January 2025, Rotterdam introduced the largest zero-emission zone for city logistics in the Netherlands, covering the entire area within the ring road. To outsiders, it may look like a switch that was simply flipped. A new paper by Quak, Kin, Van Duin, Streng and Sjouke in the City Logistics 2025 proceedings (Transportation Research …
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 …
How do you organize sustainable last-mile delivery in a dense city center? Not from behind a desk, argue Maja Kiba-Janiak and colleagues in a paper (City Logistics 2025). They report on a co-creation process in the New Center of Warsaw (NCW), where the city, businesses, couriers, residents and international experts jointly developed solutions for zero-emission …