Workforce Development Resources

Given its contribution to congestion, pollution, and energy consumption and the complex and changing characteristics of delivery routes, the modeling of urban freight transport is a difficult, highly data-demanding and often unreliable task. Extending other previous works that focused only on the morning peak hour, the authors have developed a trip generation model by using the available data to their maximum extent and adding other parameters that can be found through simple surveys. This trip generation model is then included as part of a four-stage process, with the trip distribution solved through entropy maximization and resulting in the estimation of an origin-destination matrix for freight transport in a city. The application to a case study in the city of Seville and the validation with on-street vehicle counts shows reasonably robust results and provides a simple and effective tool to analyze urban freight deliveries from a macroscopic point of view.

In the last several years there has been a surge of interest in fostering more sustainable logistical operations in urban areas. Under the umbrella of the generic term City Logistics, these initiatives try to take advantage of the coordinating power of a municipal government to convince urban delivery companies to participate in collaborative schemes that by reducing truck trips, increasing the utilization of trucks, or both, may reduce the negative externalities associated with urban truck traffic. While most research on this topic focuses on freight models (Holguin-Veras, et al, 2001), freight transport networks (Yamada, et al, 2010) and urban freight project evaluation (Thompson and Hassall, 2005), not much research has been conducted to understand the behaviors of urban carriers and freight receivers in response to the cooperative multicarrier delivery initiatives and assess its impacts on a disaggregate level. Some researchers had studied the behavioral modeling between freight agents (Thompson and Hassall, 2005). It is important to investigate the interactions between freight agent and how those relations impact decision making and policy implementation. To investigate a cooperative multicarrier delivery initiative and assess its impacts on a disaggregate level, this report is divided into two parts. The first part studies freight delivery patterns in New York City and related influential factors. Results would serve the feasibility study of implementing FCC in New York City. The second part focuses on studying the decision-making process for developing urban freight consolidation centers (FCC) using experimental economics approach. Players acting as different stakeholders are given cash bonus to mimic the decision making process.

Many city public authorities have implemented measures to alleviate the negative effects of freight transport in urban areas, but these have often proved ineffective. The literature contains studies related to ex-post assessment of urban freight transport policies. This paper proposes a methodology for ex-ante assessment of their effects. The focus is the assessment of pollutant emissions. The application of the methodology to the inner urban area of Rome shows that an urban distribution centre can be more effective in reducing environmental externalities than policies based on vehicle fleet renewal.

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Despite the recent recognition of the contribution of freight transportation to the performance of urban areas under the rubric of city logistics, the authors see a void in the study of how the stakeholders in the supply chain associated with the distribution of goods (whose destination is an urban location) might cooperate through participation in distribution networks, to reduce the costs associated with traffic congestion. Given that transport costs are typically over 45 percent of all distribution costs, with congestion contributing a substantial amount of cost in the urban setting, the importance of establishing ways in which supply chain partnerships might aid in reducing the levels of freight vehicle movements in urban areas has much merit. This paper sets out a framework to investigate how agents in the supply chain might interact more effectively to reduce their costs of urban freight distribution. The authors propose an interactive agency choice method as a way of formalizing a framework for studying the preferences of participants in the supply chain to support specific policy initiatives.