by Walther Ploos van Amstel
Every city depends on goods to function, yet urban planning scholarship pays them little attention. That is the sobering conclusion of a systematic review by Heleen Buldeo Rai (VUB), Bram Kin (HAN), and Paul Buijs (University of Groningen), published in Cities (2026) and developed within the SPRONG LILS collaboration. The authors reviewed 82 articles from …
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 …
Cities want to steer city logistics. Zero-emission zones, traffic filters, loading bays, construction logistics: the policy ambitions are big. But there is one awkward problem. Cities barely know what is actually happening on their streets. While passenger mobility has been monitored for decades with traffic models, smart card data and parking permits, freight and service …
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 …
Fifteen months after New York City introduced congestion pricing, commercial fleets have clearly adapted. New telematics data from Altitude by Geotab, based on more than 50,000 commercial vehicle trips, shows that operators have responded not by avoiding Manhattan, but by using their vehicles more efficiently. The most striking finding is a 15% increase in operational …
A new study from TU Delft researchers, published in Urban Planning (2026), offers practical insights into how cities can use urban space — including temporarily vacant plots — to keep materials circulating rather than ending up as waste. The research examines three cases in Amsterdam where the municipality used storage spaces of varying scales and …
A new academic study from TU Delft takes a deep dive into one of Amsterdam’s most pressing urban challenges: how to keep goods flowing into the city without choking its historic streets and aging infrastructure. The paper, by Bijvoet, Karademir, and Atasoy (2026), models a multimodal two-echelon distribution system for Amsterdam’s HoReCa sector (hotels, restaurants, …
Amsterdam and Berlin are among the European frontrunners in efficient urban logistics. This is shown by the European Freight Efficiency Index from Geotab, which is based on connected-vehicle data from seven European capital cities. Amsterdam scores 59 out of 100 points, finishing just behind Berlin (61). London (29) and Madrid (25) bring up the rear. …
Urban Freight at a Crossroads: What the EU’s new Transport Study tells us about the future of city logistics. A new exploratory study commissioned by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport (DG MOVE) has shed light on one of the most pressing challenges in urban mobility: getting freight smarter, cleaner, and better connected …
Cities are under pressure. More parcels, more delivery vans, less space, tighter climate targets — and a tangle of local regulations that makes collaboration harder than it needs to be. In Urban Logistics Transformation, editors Ani Melkonyan-Gottschalk (TU Clausthal) and Yanying Li (ALICE) bring together a broad group of European researchers, policymakers, and practitioners to …