by Walther Ploos van Amstel
One of the most common objections to battery-electric trucks is charging infrastructure. Long-haul electrification, the argument goes, would require huge charging parks everywhere and grid reinforcement across the board, so hydrogen or e-fuels must remain essential. A new report from Fraunhofer ISI and the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) suggests otherwise. Demand clusters in …
Fleet electrification is usually told as a technology story: replace the diesel van, optimize the route, tick the zero-emission box. Hyunji Chang’s paper in Mobilities tells a different story. Sustainable last-mile delivery is not simply implemented. It is assembled, day by day, by the people who do the work. Chang studied PostNL’s rollout of light …
The commercial vehicle industry is at an inflection point. A new factbook from BloombergNEF, produced with the Smart Freight Centre, the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure and Water Management, and Traton, offers the clearest picture yet of how fast electric trucking is scaling, and where the friction still lies. For transport and logistics managers weighing fleet …
Tanaka, Sakai, Hyodo and Kodera (Journal of Transport Geography, 2026) tackle a persistent gap in city logistics: local governments are typically responsible for zoning, curbside management and local infrastructure, yet they have far less experience and data on freight than on passenger transport, and struggle to know which freight issues to prioritize or how. The …
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 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 …
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 …
Everyone is looking at the truck in fleet electrification. Range anxiety, battery chemistry, charging speed. These dominate the conversation. And they matter. But a recent industry-wide review by Joost Commandeur (TU Delft / Shell Global Solutions), together with Bart De Schutter and Neil Yorke-Smith, mapped 91 digital solutions across site energy management, fleet scheduling, 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 …