by Walther Ploos van Amstel
Cities like Amsterdam, Utrecht, London and Paris were built on water, yet largely stopped using it as a means of transport in the twentieth century. With urban densification, climate adaptation and zero-emission targets converging, water deserves a mature place in the urban mobility mix; not as a tourist sideshow, but as a functional, affordable and …
The Physical Internet (PI) is arguably the most ambitious vision in transport logistics: fully consolidated freight flows from independent shippers, moving through open, connected, shared networks — just like data packets on the digital internet. But how far has practice actually come? A paper by Van Duin, Anand, Moolenburgh, Quak and Tavasszy in the City …
Every city depends on goods to function, yet urban planning scholarship pays them little attention. That is the sobering conclusion of a systematic review by Heleen Buldeo Rai (VUB), Bram Kin (HAN), and Paul Buijs (University of Groningen), published in Cities (2026) and developed within the SPRONG LILS collaboration. The authors reviewed 82 articles from …
Cities regulate urban freight as if every street and every delivery were the same. New research from the University of Seville, published in the European Transport Research Review (Muñuzuri et al., 2026), shows why that approach fails — and what micro-regulation could look like instead. The researchers studied 104 delivery operations across 22 streets in …
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 …
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 …