by Walther Ploos van Amstel
Digital twins are among the most promising ideas in urban logistics, and among the most overhyped. The pitch is familiar: a live virtual copy of your delivery operation that lets you simulate, reroute, and optimize in real time. Fewer failed deliveries, fuller vans, lower emissions. A new paper in Research in Transportation Business & Management …
At the WCTR conference in Toulouse, we discussed the role of city logistics in 15-minute cities. The discussion started, as it always does, with data: what do we need to know to provide the right solutions? Counting transport movements is nice. It is not sufficient. The 15-minute city promises daily needs within a short walk …
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 …
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 …
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 …
While Dutch cities spent the past year fine-tuning zero-emission zones and exemption regimes, London opened a different front. In March, the GLA and Transport for London published a progress update on the London Logistics Plan, due in late 2026 — the city’s first attempt in years to treat logistics not as a nuisance to be …
Here are some of the most notable international city logistics items from recent weeks and months: UPS restructures its UK last mile. UPS wants to reduce its UK workforce by transferring last-mile delivery to outside couriers, which would significantly change the labor landscape for legacy parcel carriers; arguably the clearest sign yet that the integrator …
Urban freight policy typically operates in silos. Vehicle access regulations — low-emission zones, weight restrictions, time windows, congestion charges — are designed and evaluated separately from loading zone management. A new study from Budapest University of Technology and Economics asks whether that separation reflects reality, or whether cities that invest in one tend to invest …
The transition to electric urban freight vehicles is often presented as a straightforward vehicle-replacement exercise: replace diesel vans and trucks with electric ones, and emissions disappear. In reality, the challenge is much broader. Vehicle range, charging time, route planning, grid capacity, and charging infrastructure all become critical operational variables. A recent Italian study examines one …