by Walther Ploos van Amstel
E-commerce has increased freight volumes and shifted freight vehicles to local streets and arterials. These changes have caused increasing concern over traffic safety in urban areas, but there has been limited investigation of road safety impacts. To advance understanding of this issue, a US research team examined recent trends in urban freight-related road safety in …
Cargo bikes are emission-free, environmentally friendly and low-noise vehicles. Cargo bikes can be effective and economically sound city logistics concepts especially for the growing number of small shipments. The German Federal Ministry of Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BMVI) set a target of 20% cargo bikes in city logistics.
A lot of attention has been paid in the last years to city logistics activities generated by specific market segments such as food, retail, or home deliveries, while relatively little attention has been paid to the transport of goods to and from construction sites in urban areas.
Roadie is creating a wide last-mile delivery network in the US by using excess capacity already on the road. MH&L talked with Marc Golin, founder, and CEO of Roadie. Marc was remodeling a property and couldn’t get the part he needed for a number of days. Driving along the freeway it occurred to him that all of …
City logistics transport became a specific research topic as the general awareness of the increasingly negative effects of freight delivery activities on local liveability grows. The awareness for external costs (congestion, emissions, noise and road safety) grew. As a result, (local) authorities implemented specific city logistics policies. Often, these limit the free, flow of traffic, …
DB Schenker has opened its first low-carbon city distribution center in Oslo (Norway), called Oslo City Hub. The centrally-located new terminal will reduce CO2 emissions of city goods distribution by 80%, using electric cars and e-bikes. Oslo City Hub is part of Electric City, the Oslo district’s focus on activities associated with its status as …
Municipal co-distribution of goods has been tried in several Swedish municipalities. The co-distribution project Upphandling Södertörn was initiated in 2014 and includes eight municipalities with a total population of about 500.000. The evaluation was presented during the Climate Friendly City Logistics in the Nordics conference.
At a conference in Brussels, Thomas Stroo, the head of logistics at delivery startup HelloFresh, highlighted the company’s success in creating a lean and centralized supply chain that can be micro-controlled from the farmer to the consumer’s kitchen. HelloFresh delivers over 80 million meals each month. In the Benelux region, HelloFresh runs 600 refrigerated delivery vans.
In B2B parcel deliveries are well planned, repeatable and reliable, the B2C segment is less predictable due to fluctuations in demand, for example, the busy December period, and the unpredictability of the customer’s at-home status. How can parcel companies solve this issue in B2C?
Cargo bikes may be cleaner, faster and quieter. But today, cargo bikes are more expensive than light commercial vans. ‘Only local policy measures can reverse that.’ According to Jochen Maes (University of Antwerps in Belgium) they find it difficult to compete with the conventional delivery based on his Phd study.