by Walther Ploos van Amstel
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 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 …
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 …
A study in Transportation Research Procedia deserves the attention of every e-commerce and parcel logistics executive currently being pitched “AI-powered presence prediction” as the next big efficiency lever. Based on interviews with twelve senior industry practitioners, the German research team delivers a much-needed reality check on a body of mathematical modeling literature that has promised …
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 …
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 …