The fight for curb space in cities is getting firmer. Recently, Uber commissioned a study to define curb productivity. There is surprisingly little research on the use of curb space for urban delivery. Cities deploy unloading bays (in many case erroneously called loading bays) in apparently random manner, with vehicles often parked outside of such bays due to lack of space when unloading space is needed. Our newest research suggests that savings of over 40% in route duration can be reached, with less claims of public space. We showed this in a live controlled experiment in the historical downtown of Queretaro in Mexico – an environment that could be considered one of the most difficult to experiment in. And the learnings for last-mile distribution all across the world are impressive!
Together with my colleague Gaston Cedillo of the Mexican Institute of Transportation, I had a dream of experimenting in a live urban environment. While there are many initiatives for pilots and other models in smart city environments, I wanted to run a controlled experiment, i.e., to measure the exact effects of introducing a certain change in the public space on the logistics efficiency and the use of public space. Building on my extensive work over the past years studying distribution to nanostores, we focused on distribution to traditional retail. With 60-90 stops on a route, such distribution activities have lots of similarities to parcel delivery and other fragmented deliveries in the developed world.
The downtown area of Queretaro is beautiful. It is a UNESCO World Heritage area. It is also a parking nightmare. With 900 nanostores in just one square kilometer the area is frequented by hundreds of vehicles per day for very small deliveries. Finding unloading space if difficult. Bays are present, but enforcing that these space is only used for unloading freight is next to impossible. With just a small number of traffic police, there is widespread illegal parking. The ideal area to run an experiment for which is almost too hard to believe this could be done.
Our experiment was quite simple in concept: during one week, we would ensure that unloading bays would be used for unloading only. However simple in concept, it was a big challenge in execution. It required an extensive deployment of traffic police: during the experiment, 20 police officers were present in our experimental area – compared to only 3 in any regular period. Effectively this meant that unloading bays were now actually available.
The results surprised me. I had expected at best 5% improvement in efficiency. We reached 44%. Delivery vehicles parked much more within loading bays than before (from 18 to 37%), reduced their total time parked by 38%, and reduced the total time driving in the area by 54%. Making available parking space for unloading hence reduces the time parked and reduces the driving time. Drivers reported much less stress, and in some cases were back at the depot an hour earlier.
Urban logistics is not so much a traffic problem; it is a parking problem
Obviously, this is just a one-week experiment, with only 10 vehicles, and we need to be careful with generalizations. However, even if the gains are only half of what we measured, the gains are substantial, and justifies additional research and experimental work on the topic of parking. As I have said at various occasions: I am more and more convinced that the urban logistics problem is not so much a traffic problem; it is actually a parking problem.
Note: The research reported above is still under peer review, which implies that we are still expecting validation by other academics on the quality and rigor of our work. However, we feel confident that the results and insights presented in this brief overview are robust.
This article was published on LinkedIn in July 2019
Acknowledgements: The unique experimental study that we were able to do in Querétaro has been made possible with financial and governance support of the Royal Netherlands Embassy in Mexico City, and with our partners: IMPLAN Querétaro, Heineken, Bonafont, Bimbo, Jumex, TomTom Telematics, and PTV Group.