by Walther Ploos van Amstel
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 …
With growing freight operations worldwide, there is a push for transportation systems to accommodate trucks during loading and unloading operations. Currently, many urban locations do not provide loading and unloading zones, which results in trucks parking in places that obstruct bicyclist’s roadway infrastructure (e.g., bicycle lanes). A bicycle simulation experiment was designed in the USA …
The Urban Freight Lab has developed an Urban Goods Delivery Toolkit, designed as a one-stop-shop for cities and transportation researchers across the U.S. to improve functionality in the Final 50 Feet segment, reducing both load/unload parking space productivity and failed first delivery attempts.
Light goods vehicles are an important part of London traffic. With changes to delivery demand and traffic patterns more broadly, they often have a big impact on cities. A group of researchers partnered with industrial organizations specializing in last-mile parcel delivery, thereby gaining access to data which allowed researchers to construct an agent-based model of the …
Research in New York assesses the parking needs of freight and service related commercial activities and identifies the role of demand management in mitigating these needs. The results show that parking needs are proportional to the average parking durations. Essentially, the longer the duration the higher the parking needs. In terms of impacts on demand …
The project will determine whether available loading and unloading zones can be related to the actual position and the estimated time of arrival of trucks on the loading and unloading zone, at the store or home address.
The DynaLOAD project by the University of Rome Tor Vergata aims at developing methods and tools that supports city planners in planning delivery scenarios and in managing and controlling the occupancy of urban areas for loading and unloading operations. Traditionally, delivery areas are defined in order to answer local problems without knowing the consequences at the global …
Trucks and delivery vans driving around in circles looking for a place to park, and then double parking when they can’t find one – it’s something you see in every city. It’s inefficient and it’s a nuisance, both to the drivers themselves and to the local residents. Last year, a team of traffic experts from …
In 2015 Barcelona introduced regulated areas for Distribució Urbana de Mercaderies (DUM) areas for loading and unloading. Following the success of the pilot scheme in Passeig de Gràcia, the rest of the city got DUMs for the loading and unloading of goods. The designation of 9,000 parking places as DUM areas aims to update and …