Growth in e-commerce has led to increasing use of light goods vehicles for parcel deliveries in urban areas. This paper provides an insight into the reasons behind this growth and the resulting effort required to meet the exacting delivery services offered by e-retailers which often lead to poor vehicle utilisation in the last-mile operation, as well as the duplication of delivery services in urban centres as competitors vie for business. A case study investigating current parcel delivery operations in central London identified the scale of the challenge facing the last-mile parcel delivery driver, highlighting the importance of walking which can account for 62% of the total vehicle round time and 40% of the total round distance in the operations studied. The characteristics of these operations are in direct conflict with the urban infrastructure which is being increasingly redesigned in favour of walking, cycling and public transport, reducing the kerbside accessibility for last-mile operations. The paper highlights other pressures on last-mile operators associated with managing seasonal peaks in demand; reduced lead times between customers placing orders and deliveries being made; meeting delivery time windows; firsttime delivery failure rates and the need to manage high levels of product returns. It concludes by describing a range of initiatives that retailers and parcel carriers, sometimes in conjunction with city authorities, can implement to reduce the costs associated with last-mile delivery, without negatively impacting on customer service levels.
a b s t r a c tUsing information gathered from some 30 UK surveys undertaken over the last 15 years, this paper provides planners with an understanding of road-based urban retail freight transport activity. The findings suggest that the average High Street business could expect up to 10 core goods and 7.6 service visits per week, in non-peak trading periods with 25% additional activity during the build up to Christmas. Vans ('light goods vehicles') were the dominant mode, responsible for 42% of delivery activity with a mean dwell time of 10 min. Where possible, load consolidation should be encouraged by methods such as Delivery and Servicing Plans and using out-of-town freight consolidation centres to bring in goods over the last mile in shared vehicles. Where this is not possible, loading bay monitoring and control, and preferred lorry routes can help manage the movement of vehicles in and out of dense urban areas.Service vehicle activity is a significant contributor to urban freight movements and often requires vehicles to be parked close to the premises being served. Centrally coordinating elements of service provision (e.g. for cleaning, equipment maintenance, recyclate collection), or providing improved, more flexible parking provision for service vehicles could be as or more beneficial in reducing overall freight impacts than focusing on core goods deliveries. In the case of the latter, 'pay-as-you-leave' car park charging systems could encourage short-stay service vehicles to park off-street.
Unlike much of the previous research on this topic, which assesses the economic consequences of failed deliveries to the home, this study examines the issue of failed delivery from a carbon-auditing perspective. It considers the potential environmental savings from the use of alternative forms of collection and delivery over traditional delivery methods for failed home deliveries. With a spreadsheet carbon audit model, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions for a failed delivery are calculated on the basis of a typical van home delivery round of 120 drops and 50-mi (80-km) distance. Three first-time delivery failure rates (10%, 30%, and 50%) are assessed. The additional CO2 from a second delivery attempt increases the emissions per drop by 9% to 75% (depending on the delivery failure rate). The vast majority (85% to 95%) of emissions emanating from a traditional failed delivery arise not from the repeat van delivery but from the personal travel associated with the customer's collecting a missed redelivery from the carrier's local depot. A range of collection–delivery points (CDPs) (supermarkets, post offices, railway stations) were all found to reduce the environmental impact of this personal travel. Post offices (currently operating a CDP system through the U.K. Royal Mail's Local Collect service) yielded the greatest savings, creating just 13% of the CO2 produced by a traditional collection by car from a local depot. Overall, the research suggests that the use of CDPs offers a convenient and more environmentally friendly alternative to redelivery and customer collection from a local parcel depot.
There is increasing interest into how horizontal collaboration between parcel carriers might help alleviate problems associated with last-mile logistics in congested urban centres. Through a detailed examination of parcel logistics literature pertaining to collaboration, along with practical insights from carriers operating in the UK, this paper examines the challenges that will be faced in optimising multi-carrier, multi-drop collection and delivery schedules. We propose the concept of the 'Freight Traffic Controller' (FTC) who would be a trusted third-party, assigned to equitably manage the work allocation between collaborating carriers and the passage of vehicles over the last mile where joint benefits to the parties were achievable. Creating this FTC requires a combinatorial optimisation approach to evaluate the many combinations of hub locations, network configuration and vehicle/walking routing options in order to find the true value of each potential collaboration, whilst at the same time, considering the traffic, social and environmental impacts of these activities. Cooperative game theory is a way to investigate the formation of collaborations (or coalitions) and our analysis identifies a significant shortfall in current applications of this theory to last-mile parcel logistics. Specifically, we identify that application of theory to urban freight logistics has, thus far, failed to account for critical concerns including: i) the mismatch of vehicle parking locations relative to actual delivery addresses; ii) the combination of deliveries with collections, the latter often being received in real-time during the round; and iii) the variability in travel times and route options due to traffic and road network conditions. Allen, Bektas, Cherrett, Friday, McLeod, Piecyk, Piotrowska, Zaltz Austwick 3 INTRODUCTIONThe parcel distribution sector is a crowded and highly competitive marketplace characterised by low profit margins and a proliferation of operators, with carriers typically operating independently from each other, leading to poor vehicle utilisation rates and delivery rounds that overlap (1). With this duplication of effort, as 'everyone delivers everywhere', and the need to reduce CO 2 in urban centres, driven by EU legislation (2), there is a need to fundamentally reinvestigate the efficiency of 'customer-focused' last-mile city logistics operations. We make three contributions in this paper: firstly, we offer a detailed examination of the literature pertaining to collaboration in last-mile parcel logistics; secondly, using our survey along with practical insights from two carrier operations in the UK, we identify key challenges that will be faced in attempting to best optimise multi-carrier, multi-drop collection and delivery schedules whilst maintaining an equitable distribution of work between the parties in the collaboration; finally, we highlight the significant gap between current theory and practice in this regard and introduce the concept of the Freight Traffic Controller as a ...
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