While it is common to see Amazon Prime vans circling the city of Seattle year-round, there might be even more deliveries than usual right now, thanks to the Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals that rang in the holiday season.

Researchers at the 91探花 were curious how the delivery of e-commerce products affects pollution levels across the Seattle metropolitan area, which includes Tacoma, Seattle, Bellevue and Everett.

According to the team’s study, neighborhoods within 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) of an Amazon last-mile delivery station or sortation center are exposed to twice the amount of delivery van and truck traffic than neighborhoods farther away. These neighborhoods are home to a higher proportion of low-income households and people of color compared to the rest of the metro area. These residents also order 14% fewer packages than average in this area.

The researchers Dec. 2 in Research in Transportation Economics.

“E-commerce is changing how we shop and how we travel in cities, but transportation researchers don’t really have a good way to measure or even talk about e-commerce in terms of equity,” said lead author , a 91探花doctoral student in the civil and environmental engineering department. “So, we started by asking, ‘Well, who’s ordering the packages?’ which I think we have a clearer idea of now. Then we asked, ‘Who’s affected by the pollution and the traffic that this ordering creates?’ Our study found that there’s a substantial disparity between those two populations.”

Because this is the first study of its kind, the researchers started by looking for broad trends based on household income and race. “People of color” in this study included people who identified as any other race or ethnicity besides non-Hispanic white on the census. The team defined a ‘vulnerable’ neighborhood as one with a below-average household income and a higher percentage of people of color compared to the broader metropolitan area.

To get an idea of who was ordering packages, the researchers used data from the , which, in a recent survey, included a question about how many packages people were ordering on an average day.

From there, the team looked at where the neighborhoods were situated compared to Amazon last-mile delivery stations.

“Last-mile delivery stations are a unique feature to the Amazon supply chain,” Fried said. “They have trucks going in, usually from a sortation or a fulfillment center that’s a little bit further out from the city. Then coming out the other end are cargo vans 鈥� these are the cargo vans that we see circulating our neighborhoods. Ultimately, we tried to estimate this inflow of trucks and outflow of cargo vans.”

The researchers chose to focus on Amazon because it is the biggest player in the e-commerce market. Any trend they found for Amazon would likely be similar for other e-commerce companies, the researchers said.

Based on a neighborhood’s proximity to a last-mile delivery station and the residential ordering behaviors, the researchers could model how cargo vans and trucks were distributed throughout the network. Then they used the to simulate the amount of pollution each neighborhood would experience.

“It’s almost like each warehouse represents a sun with rays emanating out of it,” Fried said. “Those rays will be more intense the closer you are, and then as it branches out to other neighborhoods, it becomes less dense. The closer you are to something that’s hot, the more heat you will end up feeling. And these warehouses are just massive generators of freight activity. But not all that is destined for those neighborhoods nearby. And that’s where the inequity lies.”

In some ways these results are not surprising, the researchers said.

“Warehousing and distribution centers have historically concentrated in historically marginalized communities, including those with a high number of low-income households and a high proportion of people of color,” Fried said. “The concentration of industrial zoning happened through mechanisms that were either explicitly racialized during the early-to-mid 20th century or had the indirect effect of creating segregation near industrial land. Even though these policies are illegal today, we still see evidence of them locked into our modern-day development.”

The researchers hope to expand this finding in future studies by looking at how these results specifically affect different racial and ethnic groups as well as other vulnerable groups, such as older adults and people with disabilities. The team is also planning to make the model more easily accessible for other cities to use.

As for what the average consumer can do now, the answer is not straightforward.

“You could say, ‘OK, just stop shopping online.’ But then people may just be driving more to shop and there will be more cars on the road, which still leads to more air pollution,” Fried said. “There’s no easy solution to this issue. But if we’re trying to improve something, we need to at least know where we start.”

Additional co-authors on this paper are , 91探花doctoral student in the industrial and systems engineering department, and , 91探花professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the .

For more information, contact Fried at tfried3@uw.edu.

In Amazon鈥檚 hometown, people turn to their computers to order everything from groceries to last-minute birthday presents to the odd toothbrush or medication forgotten from the store.

If online shopping continues to grow at its current rate, there may be twice as many trucks delivering packages in Seattle鈥檚 city center within five years, a new report projects 鈥� and double the number of trucks looking for a parking space.

In the , the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) and the 91探花鈥檚 at the have analyzed solutions for alleviating urban congestion by making truck parking spaces more productive and reducing the growth of truck traffic.

鈥淪eattle is the perfect laboratory to find better ways of managing commercial truck parking and delivering packages in urban settings,鈥� said , SCTL director and a 91探花professor of civil and environmental engineering. 鈥淏y testing data-driven solutions on our streets and in our buildings, we hope to reduce traffic in congested areas of the city as well as missed deliveries that frustrate consumers and retailers alike.鈥�

By mapping privately owned delivery infrastructure for the first time, a team of 91探花researchers and students found that 87 percent of all the buildings in downtown Seattle, Uptown (also known as lower Queen Anne) and South Lake Union have to rely on the city鈥檚 curb and alley space to receive deliveries. Only 13 percent of buildings have loading bays or docks that allow trucks to park on private property.

That鈥檚 why the report focuses on what鈥檚 known as the 鈥淔inal 50 Feet鈥� problem: the last and surprisingly complicated leg of an urban delivery that begins when a driver must find a place to park a truck or vehicle 鈥� usually on a public street or alleyway 鈥� and ends when the customer takes receipt of their package.

It鈥檚 part of a broader research initiative spearheaded the by SCTL鈥檚 , which is partnering with SDOT, Nordstrom, UPS, the U.S. Postal Service and Charlie鈥檚 Produce to re-think everything from how cities apportion curb and street space to how building owners manage the growing avalanche of packages delivered to urban towers.

鈥淪eattle is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, and SDOT is committed to meeting the urban goods delivery challenges facing most big cities in the U.S.,” said Christopher Eaves, project manager at SDOT. 鈥淲e know that issuing parking tickets to companies who are simply trying to meet the daily delivery needs of residents and businesses isn鈥檛 the right solution. So, our goal is to identify and implement scalable strategies that improve deliveries at existing buildings, as well as initiate strategic research to mine new data.鈥�

The 91探花research team found that reducing the number of failed delivery attempts as well as the amount of time a delivery truck is parked in a loading space could offer significant public and private benefits. 91探花researchers and SDOT plan to test promising improvement strategies in and on the streets around the聽 this spring.

鈥淭hese two actions alone could reduce congestion and free up curb space for cars, buses, bicycles and other people who need to use that shared public space,鈥� said Barbara Ivanov, director of the Urban Freight Lab. 鈥淭hose efficiencies have the added benefit of saving retailers and delivery services money, and getting orders into the hands of customers faster.鈥�

Cutting down on failed first delivery attempts has the potential to greatly reduce truck trips in Seattle, cut business costs and ensure that tenants in multifamily buildings can shop online and get their orders when they expect them, the report finds.

By tracking real-world deliveries in a downtown office building 鈥� the Seattle Municipal Tower 鈥� a hotel, a residential building, a historic building and the retail mall at Westlake Center, the 91探花researchers discovered delivery drivers encounter logistical barriers that consume a significant portion of their time. Clearing security in urban towers took 12 percent of the total time, and looking for tenants and riding freight elevators took 61 percent of the total time.

The report estimates that 73 percent of delivery time is spent in buildings and, as a result, the Urban Freight Lab will pilot test a smart locker system in the loading bay of the Seattle Municipal Tower. This could substantially reduce delivery time, failed first deliveries and the amount of time that delivery trucks occupy parking spaces that serve the building.

The smart locker system pilot will allow drivers from multiple delivery companies to securely leave packages in the vestibule of the 62-story Municipal Tower. Then, the locker system will notify enrolled tenants of deliveries by text or email and send a lock code, allowing them to pick up the packages at their convenience rather than having to stop working and intercept a delivery person in their office.

The Final 50 Feet project is the first time that SDOT, in partnership with the Urban Freight Lab, has analyzed both the street network and the city鈥檚 vertical space such as office, hotel, retail and residential towers as one unified goods delivery system.

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For more information, contact Goodchild at annegood@uw.edu and Ivanov at ivanovb@uw.edu.