by Walther Ploos van Amstel
Fleet electrification is usually told as a technology story: replace the diesel van, optimize the route, tick the zero-emission box. Hyunji Chang’s paper in Mobilities tells a different story. Sustainable last-mile delivery is not simply implemented. It is assembled, day by day, by the people who do the work. Chang studied PostNL’s rollout of light …
The Dutch postal market is at an impasse. PostNL holds a monopoly on letter mail delivery; service quality is deteriorating rapidly, and prices are rising sharply (in some cases by 150 to 300 percent). At the same time, the company claims that its letter mail service is loss-making and is demanding subsidies or seeking to …
PostNL opened 2026 with a notable shift in its e-commerce operations: total parcel volume dropped 7.1% compared to the same quarter last year. Yet the company made this choice deliberately. So what’s going on? Fewer parcels, but worth more Revenue from the e-commerce segment came in at €451 million, down from €473 million in Q1 …
The Dutch postal market is presenting a peculiar spectacle. PostNL wants to shed its legal obligation to provide the universal postal service because it is threatening to become loss-making. A consortium of Business Post and Spotta offers to take it over. The minister turns that offer down. And then the consortium doesn’t lodge an objection. …
In 2025, Dutch PostNL continued its strategic transformation from a traditional postal and parcel operator into a digitally driven, data-powered logistics platform. Innovation focused on modernising the digital ecosystem, embedding AI into daily operations, strengthening cybersecurity, and improving customer experience across the entire delivery journey. At the customer interface, the PostNL app became the central …
The last mile is undergoing a rapid technological shift. Logistics companies are electrifying their fleets and deploying new digital systems for routing, tracking, and delivery management. Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly built into these systems, promising lower emissions, shorter distances, reduced fuel use, and lower operating costs. But Hanbit Chang’s dissertation, Rerouting the Last-Mile: Contested …
Cities are increasingly adopting zero-emission zones (ZEZs) as a core strategy to reduce local air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and road transport noise. While much of the policy and research attention has focused on passenger cars and heavy goods vehicles (HGVs), there is growing interest in the role of light electric freight vehicles (LEFVs), including …
The postal market in the Netherlands is under serious pressure. Declining mail volumes, rising costs, labor shortages, and digitization are making it increasingly challenging to fulfill the universal service obligation (USO)—the statutory requirement to deliver mail nationwide—reliably and affordably. PostNL, which is responsible for this task, has for some time failed to meet the 95% next-day delivery …
Dutch PostNL is opening up its 1,000 parcel lockers machines to other carriers. GLS Netherlands is the first competitor to utilize this network for parcel deliveries. PostNL aims to connect more carriers to the network in the future. This is good news; the future of home delivery is in joint delivery with shared fleets. However, …
Dutch PostNL will open its parcel locker network to other carriers in 2023. This means that from then on, consumers will be able to pick up and send parcels from different carriers at a PostNL parcel locker. This is an exciting development in the parcel market to give consumers more (sustainable) delivery options. Automatic parcel …