by Walther Ploos van Amstel
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 …
A new study compares how five global cities handle e-commerce deliveries — and finds that context is everything. City logistics keeps growing, and with it, the pressure on urban streets. More parcels, more vans, more congestion, and more urgency for cities to find smarter solutions. But which solutions actually work? A new study published in …
Scroll through any academic journal on city logistics, and you will find the same framing: how do we scale out-of-home delivery systems to keep pace with the rapid growth of e-commerce? It is an important-sounding question. It is also, increasingly, the wrong one. The inconvenient truth is this: e-commerce is no longer growing the way …
For city logistics professionals, the question of where to focus last-mile investment has long been complicated by conflicting evidence. Do urban consumers drive demand for home delivery, or do rural consumers, who have less access to physical stores, rely on it more? A new study tracking US consumer behavior from 2010 to 2023 provides the …
Last week, I attended the CityFreight Workshop in Bergen, Norway, “Sustainability in Urban Logistics – What Are Key Challenges & Future Research Agendas?” The event was excellently organized by the Center for Climate and Energy Transformation (CET) at the University of Bergen and the Center for Shipping and Logistics at the NHH Norwegian School of …
The Awaken Sleeping Assets Project is a unique collaboration of cities (Paris, Stockholm, Vienna, and Hamburg), industries, and research partners representing four different European countries (Austria, France, Germany, and Sweden). It aims to gather and process relevant information at the local level on obstacles, success factors, logistics parameters, framework conditions, and impacts of sustainable urban …
A survey article by Mor Kaspi, Tal Raviv, and Marlin W. Ulmer provides an overview of future directions for research in urban mobility and city logistics. It sets a focus on three severe changes in the business models: Service fleets might fully or partially be autonomous in the future, which brings new operational opportunities and …
Finding the optimal route between multiple destinations (the traveling salesman problem) is a challenge regularly faced by Amazon’s Last Mile team. Meeting that challenge has meant developing planning software to allow Amazon’s delivery fleet to find the most efficient routes. But what happens when drivers must deviate from those routes? Drivers have access to real-time …
To achieve the transition from diesel to zero-emission city logistics companies should prepare smartly on five levels. These levels require new scientific insights. Therefore Sustainability is preparing a special edition on zero-emission city logistics. Guest editor is prof. dr. Walther Ploos van Amstel.
From September 2019 up to and including January 2020, students of Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences provided the last mile for HoReCa establishments in the inner city of Rotterdam and Schiedam under the name HR Cargo for logistics service provider Nedcargo. The results of a first pilot in 2018 led to an expansion of HR …