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Are you interested in last-mile freight planning?
Our debate today works with the article titled The state of sustainable urban last-mile freight planning in the United States from 2024, by Thomas Maxner, Giacomo Dalla Chiara, and Anne Goodchild, published in the Journal of American Planning Association.
This is a great preparation to our next interview with Anne Goodchild in episode 466 talking about urban freight and last-mile delivery opportunities and challenges.
Since we are investigating the future of cities, I thought it would be interesting to see how we can improve urban freight despite the vague urban guidelines. This article argues for better data collection and private-sector collaboration to effectively decarbonise the urban delivery sector.
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Welcome to today’s What is The Future For Cities podcast and its Research episode; my name is Fanni, and today we will introduce a research by summarising it. The episode really is just a short summary of the original investigation, and, in case it is interesting enough, I would encourage everyone to check out the whole documentation on the WTF4Cities website where you can find the shownotes and more information on supporting the podcast. This conversation was produced and generated with Gemini LM as two hosts dissecting the whole research.
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Speaker 1: Usually when we talk about a city’s cardiovascular system, its roads and infrastructure, we think about the blood flow of commuters, right? It’s a predictable morning and evening pulse.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the standard rush hour.
Speaker 1: But suddenly there’s this massive influx of a completely different element to the bloodstream.
Speaker 2: It’s a complete shift in the cellular makeup of our streets really. We’ve moved away from centralized retail logistics, big trucks delivering to big stores, toward highly fragmented, unconsolidated rush deliveries. You order a toothbrush online, and a two-ton vehicle brings it straight to your door the next morning.
Speaker 1: Exactly. Today we’re looking at that explosion of e-commerce and the growing crisis of last-mile freight emissions in the United States. Dense, growing cities are facing up to a 30% increase in goods-related vehicle traffic in the coming decade.
Speaker 2: Which makes this an absolutely critical and public health issue.
Speaker 1: It really does. Our discussion today is grounded in a comprehensive content analysis of municipal planning documents from 58 major US cities assessing the state of sustainable urban last-mile freight planning.
Speaker 2: And we arrive at a startling disagreement in the data, given that only 17 of the 58 studied cities, which is just 29%, have articulated an intent to dedicate resources toward actionable freight planning.
Speaker 1: So what does that actually signal? Because to me, this reads as a glaring failure of municipal leadership. Cities have the leverage, and they need to urgently transition from vague guidelines to concrete infrastructure-based regulations.
Speaker 2: Whereas I look at that exact same data and see a necessary, prudent phase of observation. You simply cannot prematurely regulate a sprawling private industry before you understand how it actually operates.
Speaker 1: The data reveals what I can only call gross negligence. When we look at the numbers, freight already makes up 10 to 12% of transportation emissions in cities like Oakland, Seattle, and New York City.
Speaker 2: Which is a massive chunk.
Speaker 1: It is. And here’s the kicker. While passenger vehicle emissions are actually falling, freight emissions are rising rapidly. Yet 45% of the 58 cities studied haven’t even mentioned last-mile freight in their sustainability plans.
Speaker 2: They haven’t explicitly named it yet.
Speaker 1: Exactly. But cities own the physical infrastructure. They own the curb space. They own the roads. They have the leverage to force change, but they are just sitting on their hands. Municipalities must immediately adopt what the study calls Tier 3 actionable programs and Tier 4 measurable goals.
Speaker 2: Wait, but are those goals realistic right now?
Speaker 1: They are. Look at San Jose.
They set a goal for 100% of local delivery vehicles to be electric by 2040. That is the standard every city should be aiming for.
Speaker 2: See, I think you’re underestimating the unique complexity of urban freight. Unlike a public transit system or even passenger vehicles, freight is entirely controlled by a heterogeneous mix of private companies. You have massive global players, but you also have countless small independent couriers. So the infancy of urban freight planning isn’t negligence. It’s a reflection of the fact that cities lack fundamental data on how these private supply chains route their vehicles. Rushing into heavy-handed regulations without that data leads to wasted resources and failed policies.
Speaker 1: But they could get the data if they acted.
Speaker 2: Eventually, sure. But besides the private sector Companies like PepsiCo, UPS, Volvo, they’re already actively financing their own decarbonization. Cities are wise to focus first on communication and collaboration, like Austin and Chicago forming industry working groups before they start issuing sweeping mandates.
Speaker 1: But those working groups usually just produce what the research categorizes as tier one or tier two planning. That’s essentially anecdotal references and vague guidelines. The study found that sixty-nine percent of the municipal strategies are stuck in these bottom two tiers.
Speaker 2: Because those are the building blocks.
Speaker 1: Are they? Relying on tier two planning is like trying to diet by only reading nutrition labels without ever changing what you eat. Look at Charlotte. They formally committed to reducing excessive vehicle idling in their twenty forty-five metropolitan transportation plan.
Speaker 2: Which is a step forward, right?
Speaker 1: Except they outlined zero concrete steps to actually enforce it. Without actionable programs, these documents are really just wishes dressed up as policy.
Speaker 2: But you can’t change what you eat until you’ve actually read and understood the nutrition label. Tier I and tier two are necessary foundational steps for information sharing.
Speaker 1: I just don’t see them as sufficient.
Speaker 2: Take Tampa’s Office of Sustainability, providing centralized maps of public chargers. The study labels that a tier I strategy, but that is highly actionable for a private logistics manager deciding where to route their electric vans.
Speaker 1: Okay, but it’s not a measurable mandate.
Speaker 2: Because how do you mandate a tier four fifty percent emissions reduction when you don’t even know your starting number? According to the source material, out of all fifty-eight cities, only New York City and Seattle have actually managed to estimate the number of trucks making last mile deliveries.
Speaker 1: You find that starting number by regulating the infrastructure you do control, which forces the industry to adapt and report their data to you. And honestly, while we wait around for cities to perfectly count every truck, low-income neighbourhoods near these urban warehouses are actually breathing in diesel exhaust.
Speaker 2: Which is terrible. Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 1: We don’t have the time to wait for private companies to voluntarily optimize their routes. Cities need to use sticks. Los Angeles is a great example. They’ve started implementing actual low emission delivery zones.
Speaker 2: But sticks can backfire.
Speaker 1: Not if they’re enforced. If a city aggressively tickets a delivery van for idling in a bus lane or parking illegally, that eats directly into the company’s razor-thin profit margins.
That financial penalty is the mechanism that actually forces companies to switch to smaller, greener tech, like cargo bikes that can park legally.
Speaker 2: But those razor-thin margins are exactly why the carrot approach highlighted in the study is so much more effective. If you just drop a heavy fine or ban trucks from a zone without offering an alternative, you don’t solve the emissions problem.
Speaker 1: You force them to adapt.
Speaker 2: No, you just push the congestion to the neighbourhood next door, or you cripple local commerce. Carrots actually build the alternative. Look at providing municipal real estate for micro hubs.
Speaker 1: Micro hubs being the transfer stations?
Speaker 2: Exactly. These are specialized facilities where goods are transferred off large diesel trucks and onto smaller low-emission vehicles for that final mile. Or look at New York City designating street corrals specifically for cargo bikes. Companies ultimately decide which technologies to adopt based on logistical feasibility. You have to facilitate the transition, not just penalize the status quo.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can offer all the carrots you want, but if the city government is completely fragmented, you’re just throwing money into a bureaucratic black hole. The study points out an alarming lack of cross-departmental cohesion in these local governments. In 11 of the cities, freight strategies were mentioned by only one single agency.
Speaker 2: Wow.
Speaker 1: Just one. Look at Los Angeles again. Their sustainability office released a Green New Deal that explicitly champions cargo bikes, which is fantastic. But the Department of Transportation’s Great Streets plan completely ignores them. The right hand isn’t talking to the left.
Speaker 2: I will agree that municipal fragmentation is a massive issue, but that internal disconnect actually proves my entire point against immediate aggressive regulation.
Speaker 1: How does dysfunction prove we shouldn’t act?
Speaker 2: Because think about how local government physically operates. The Department of Transportation controls the asphalt, the curbs, and the construction budget. So if an Office of Sustainability mandates a sweeping all-electric delivery fleet, but the DOT refuses to rezone the curbs to install the necessary chargers, the policy is going to fail spectacularly. Cities have to get their internal definitions and collaborations in order before they launch massive interventions into private supply chains.
Speaker 1: The rapidly rising emissions curve simply doesn’t give us the luxury of waiting for municipal departments to hold hands. I maintain that this crisis demands actionable tier-four measurable plans right now to force industry compliance.
Speaker 2: And I maintain that if you attempt to regulate a sprawling, moving target without gathering data first, you’ll cause far more economic and logistical harm than good.
Speaker 1: Though we are obviously divided on the timeline and severity of intervention, there is one foundational flaw revealed in the study where we completely converge. Cities urgently need to adopt a standardized definition of urban freight.
Speaker 2: Absolutely. It is staggering that 34 of the 58 cities still problematically conflate last mile e-commerce deliveries with regional highway transport or port drayage.
Speaker 1: Those are completely different universes.
Speaker 2: Exactly. A massive drayage truck hauling 40-foot shipping containers from the docks operates under entirely different logistical and regulatory realities than a guy on a cargo bike delivering groceries downtown. You simply cannot solve a problem if you are using the wrong vocabulary to describe it across your own city departments.
Speaker 1: Which brings us back to our city’s cardiovascular system. Whether you think we need an immediate surgical intervention to handle this influx of delivery vehicles or a careful diagnostic study to understand the blood flow before we operate-
Speaker 2: The health of our urban spaces depends on taking this seriously.
Speaker 1: Exactly. Looking at policy through the dual lenses of urgency and pragmatism reveals just how much work lies ahead. We invite you to look at your own city’s long-range plans and see where they fall on the tier system. The ultimate conclusion is up to you.
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