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 …
European cities have no shortage of pilots for cleaner and smarter urban freight. The real challenge is turning promising experiments into lasting logistics solutions. The GREEN-LOG project offers useful lessons on how to do that. Its new Policy Recommendations brochure brings together three years of experience from Living Labs in Athens, Barcelona, Flanders, Oxfordshire and …
A new report from Copenhagen Economics, commissioned by PostEurop and published in May 2026, makes a clear-cut argument: the EU e-commerce parcel delivery market functions well, and sector-specific regulation would likely do more harm than good. However, the PostEurop-commissioned report concludes EU parcel markets are competitive, but self-reported operator data and the client’s direct interest …
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 …
A paper presented at City Logistics 2025 (Winkelmann, Nandakumar, Spruijtenburg, de Bok — TNO and TU Delft) puts a number on something many city logistics practitioners have suspected but rarely quantified: zero-emission zones (ZEZs) can improve air quality in the city center while quietly shifting the burden onto poorer neighborhoods nearby. The Netherlands has committed …
A new paper presented at IPIC 2026 (Errami, Hashemi-Petroodi, Puchinger, Klibi) tackles a problem central to the Physical Internet vision for cities: how do you actually get competing logistics providers and public transport authorities to share infrastructure, not just talk about it? The model, developed under the EU MODALSHIFT project and tested on a real …
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 …
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 …
For many years, Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs) focused primarily on moving people. Walking, cycling, public transport, and private cars dominated the discussion, while urban freight was often reduced to a few pages on deliveries or low-emission zones. The third edition of the Guidelines for Developing and Implementing a Sustainable Urban Mobility Plan marks a …
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 …