Publication Features
Inhabited islands are susceptible to natural hazards, such as wildfires. To avoid disasters, preventative measures and guidelines need to be in place to strengthen community resilience. If these fail, evacuation is often the only choice. However, island evacuation is a vastly understudied problem in both research and practice, particularly for islands without permanent road connections to the mainland that require marine evacuation.
A growing body of research looks specifically at freight vehicle parking choices for purposes of deliveries to street retail, and choice impacts on travel time/uncertainty, congestion, and emissions. However, little attention was given to large urban freight traffic generators, e.g., shopping malls and commercial buildings with offices and retail. These pose different challenges to manage freight vehicle parking demand, due to the limited parking options.
Amazon in 2019 pledged to become a net-zero carbon business by 2040. In the wake of that pledge, Amazon financially supported this Urban Freight Lab research examining two key questions.
- What is the current state of sustainable urban freight planning in the United States?
- What are the challenges to achieving a sustainable urban freight system in the United States and Canada?
In an effort to reduce emissions from last-mile deliveries and incentivize green vehicle adoption, The New York City Department of Transportation (NYC DOT) is seeking to implement a Green Loading Zone (GLZ) pilot program. A Green Loading Zone is curb space designated for the sole use of “green” vehicles, which could include electric and alternative fuel vehicles as well as other zero-emission delivery modes like electric-assist cargo bikes.
Green Loading Zones (GLZs) are curb spaces dedicated to the use of electric or alternative fuel (“green”) delivery vehicles. Some U.S. cities have begun piloting GLZs to incentivize companies to purchase and operate more green vehicles. However, there are several questions to be answered prior to a GLZ implementation, including siting, potential users and their willingness to pay.
Reducing CO2 emissions from urban freight requires the collaboration and coordination between those agents, but the motivations behind their goals, strategies for achieving those goals, and the challenges faced by each agent may differ. In this paper, we document the strategies aimed at reducing CO2 emissions considered by cities and private companies with the goal of understanding the challenges to progress faced by each.
As awareness of the vulnerability of isolated regions to natural disasters grows, the demand for efficient evacuation plans is increasing. However, isolated areas, such as islands, often have characteristics that make conventional methods, such as evacuation by private vehicle, impractical to infeasible. Mathematical models are conventional tools for evacuation planning.
As urbanized populations and concentrations of activities increase, there is growing pressure in dense and constrained urban areas to unlock the potential of every public infrastructure element to address the increasing demand for public space. Specifically, there is a growing demand for space for parking operations related to the access to land use by people and goods.
Electric vehicles, one of the emerging modes of transportation, are at the forefront of sustainable mobility. In the past years, there has been a rapid rise in EVs, both as private and public transportation modes. Private users are influenced by multiple factors while choosing electric cars as their travel modes. Among them, policy and infrastructure are deemed to be the main influencers globally. These policies and infrastructures vary in different cities.
Seattle now ranks as the nation’s sixth-fastest growing city and is among the nation’s densest. As the city grows, so do truck volumes—volumes tied to economic growth for Seattle and the region as a whole. But many streets are already at capacity during peak hours and bottleneck conditions are worsening.