by Walther Ploos van Amstel
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Urban freight is competing for an increasingly scarce resource: curb space. The growth of e-commerce, grocery deliveries, on-demand services and ride-hailing has intensified pressure on city streets, while many cities continue to redesign public space primarily for pedestrians, cyclists and public transport. The result is a growing mismatch between freight demand and curb availability, leading …