How delivery services and online stores in the US affect traffic congestion

Today, consumers spend less time in local stores and more time on the Internet, buying not only retail products, but also food, office supplies and much more.

According to the National Transportation Planning Board in the metropolitan area (which includes Washington, Arlington and Alexandria), on average, every US citizen creates demand for about 60 tons of cargo annually. In 2010, the United States Post Office, which overtook FedEx and UPS as the largest package delivery service in the country, delivered 3.1 billion packages in the country.
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The growth of electronic commerce is fueling a commensurate increase in the number of delivery vehicles — vans, minivans and cars — on the streets. While freight currently accounts for about 7% of urban traffic in US cities, they account for the disproportionate overload cost of $ 28 billion, or about 17% of the total overload cost in the US, measured by the number of idle hours and greenhouse emissions. gas in traffic.

When we talk about the historic American urban urban home delivery ecosystem, ice-cream trucks, morning newspaper hawkers, and milk workers are the first to appear. Before the widespread use of refrigerators, city residents received perishable food and newspapers daily. But besides this, in the XX century, other goods were delivered to the house. Usually, the customers tried products in the store, measured the clothes and inspected the furniture they wanted to buy, and then asked the sellers to send home everything that they could not carry themselves, take them by taxi or public transport. It was for this purpose that a UPS delivery service was created in Seattle in 1907.

In general, however, wholesale delivery prevailed. These were supplies of large retail goods to stores in shopping areas. When planning such areas, they thought about how trucks could move along the streets.

In recent years, urban residents have outplayed the script. Since the beginning of this decade, online retail sales in the US have grown by about 15% each year. On average, 241 delivery service drivers are forced to wade through a heavy stream of cars every day in order to deliver books, clothes, food and household goods — things that customers can easily pick up in stores. It happens that drivers deliver boxes of toiletries to residents of an apartment building, although there is a pharmacy or grocery store in the same block.

In 2010, UPS delivered 1.1 million shipments to the District of Colombia in March alone. Now the service delivers 6,5 thousand packages more every day than it did then. The demand is so great that this year, for the first time in its history, UPS will start delivering parcels with trucks on Saturdays.

The problem is that we now live in a world where brick and mortar stores are only part of the retail equation, and shrinking. Demand is caused by people in their own homes and apartments, where they order fewer goods with a higher frequency: food from one store on the same day, household goods from another - on the next. Jean-Paul Rodrigue, a professor of global research and geography at Hofstra University, recently completed his own survey delivery in a 300-flat apartment building in northern New Jersey. During 2016, 23,000 parcels were delivered - about 65 per day.

As more goods are ordered, more and more delivery services trucks are sent to narrow city streets. Freight vans are parked on a two-lane street if there is no area for loading. Alison Conway, an associate professor of civil engineering at City College in New York, conducted several pilot studies in 2016, assessing the number of packages arriving at residential buildings, as well as the associated car trips and parking schemes.

A study of residential locations has revealed problems that leave trucks idling on the street: there are no freight elevators for delivery and loading areas where trucks could park. In a place like New York, where more than 120,000 parcels are delivered daily in Manhattan below 60th Street, according to the city’s transportation department, these missing conditions exacerbate the problem of congestion.

Chairman of the Center for Real Estate Analysis and Urban Analysis at George Washington University, Christopher Leinberger, argues that the current model of city parking cannot continue to work, given the growing demand for online purchases. The daily shipment of truck columns through crowded streets of Manhattan or down M Street in Georgetown is just a transfer of the suburban model of e-commerce delivery to a well-kept urban environment.

However, not all experts on urban transport systems are convinced that traffic jams caused by the delivery of goods that have now moved to the cities have actually existed for quite a long time. “If we slowly increase the share of freight traffic over the next 20 years, everything will be fine. This is offset by fewer private car trips, ”says David Levinson, a professor at the School of Civil Engineering at the University of Sydney and co-author of the book“ The End of Traffic and the Future of Transport ” . “We could consume more [goods] as a whole, but the vast majority of them are substitution. And there is a lot of evidence that people are less likely to go shopping. ”

Levinson's idea is that if online shopping grows and more delivery vehicles appear on the roads, home supplies compensate for personal shopping trips, reducing the total number of cars on the roads and, ultimately, reducing congestion. And while cultural changes are taking place, cities will struggle with delivery services in the short term. In due course in life the situation will disappear when the delivery service van closed your exit for you, having parked the second row. You just have nothing to park.

“Delivery of goods to the United States is currently an apple of discord. But the number of passenger cars on the street is likely to decrease. I suspect that there will be less congestion, ”says Rodrig, who also believes that the appearance of cars on autopilot will be a boon to the cargo area.

Others, like Jose Holguín-Veras, director of the Center for Advanced Technologies for Sustainable Urban Transport Systems at the Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, are less optimistic. He says that the data he is studying show that the number of trips by motor vehicles has increased in pure terms. As an example, he cites UPS homeland - Seattle. The data of the regional council show that the number of non-working trips increased from 10.3 million per day in 2006 to 12.6 million in 2014.

Delivery from online stores does not replace trips to stores, it simply complements it. “When you are sitting in your house, you don’t give a damn about the fact that the order is just a book or a watch. You do not include shipping costs. And if you get free shipping, you have the illusion that it’s easy. Therefore, you order a lot, ”says Olgin-Veras.

Directly addressing consumer behavior is perhaps the hardest part. How to ask citizens to stop buying goods on the Internet and order home delivery, when they can be easily purchased at a local store, conveniently located in a dense urban environment?

Many American cities are playing catch-up trying to understand these new problems and delivery systems. This is partly due to the failures of urban planning and the nature of transportation. While public policy issues such as public transport, bicycle lanes and pedestrians are within the purview of planning councils and municipal departments of transport, delivery has always been a purely private enterprise.

This means that in cities there is not even reliable data on the number of trucks that pass through their streets. “Urban planning organizations regularly collect personal travel data. We don’t have similar data on freight traffic and on the movement of goods on a large city scale. Amazing surprise, we don’t understand this very well, ”says Anne Goodchild, director of the Center for Logistics and Transport at the University of Washington in Seattle.

Recently, the center organized a partnership between the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Seattle Department of Transportation and private delivery companies, the Urban Freight Lab. The task of the laboratory is to collect some data. Until now, Goodchild and a team of students measured the waiting time (how long the vehicle should remain on the street) and unsuccessful deliveries (when the driver is going to deliver the parcel, but cannot, because the recipient is not at home and cannot sign). These are the data that Seattle hopes to include in the delivery strategy for urban goods, one of the cornerstones of the "master plan for freight traffic" adopted in the city in 2016.

“This will lead to a range of political issues,” said Scott Kubly, director of Seattle DOT. “For example, how to avoid coercion? With the volume of shipments, issue of fines is ineffective for us in terms of street management. UPS and FedEx will simply agree on a one-time payment for all the fines they receive, instead of fighting each one. ”

For large commercial suppliers, parking fines are only part of the cost of doing business. In 2006, UPS paid New York a $ 18.7 million parking ticket. In 2011, in Washington, DC, UPS alone issued nearly 32,000 fines.

Instead of resolving the issue with every fine, many major cities enter into agreements or implement programs with which delivery companies can pay the entire fine one time. An example is the program of fines provided for in New York: by refusing the right to work with parking tickets, delivery companies pay a pre-set reduced fine for each parking violation.

If coercion does not work in this case, it may be possible to redirect the delivery traffic. So the Seattle authorities decided: instead of allowing road workers to expand the roads in the lanes, they can be used to accommodate the incoming traffic of delivery services.

In New York, where over the past five years, deliveries to residential areas have increased by 30%, the freight mobility department of transport is now developing its own plan for freight transportation. He also works with the Holguin-Veras center to obtain delivery data from several private companies. By signing a non-disclosure agreement with the university, the department can access summary delivery data for indicators such as latency.

Even Uber, as part of its new initiative, Movement provides access to aggregated driver data to urban planners so that they can better understand the behavior of traffic and commuter trips.

Some cities have also begun to take concrete steps to solve this problem - sometimes on their own, and sometimes in partnership with private companies. In New York, there is a slow transition to overtime deliveries. Of the approximately 18,000 Big Apple restaurants, approximately 400 now deliver after-hours from 7 pm to 6 am

José Holguín-Veras conducted a study on the change in delivery time and found out that the truck “traveling” in the evening reduced greenhouse gas emissions by more than 600 tons per year compared to the truck going on the road in the morning.