The FTC2050 project aimed to identify and evaluate urban freight logistics initiatives that may have the greatest impact on reducing fuel consumption and energy requirements.
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A fundamental ambition of the FTC2050 project was to investigate the potential impact of carriers working together to reduce their combined carbon footprint.
The FTC2050 project investigated the use of porters for the ‘last-200m’ delivery of parcels, reducing the need for vans by decoupling the motorised transport from the delivery.
Retailers, couriers and customers can reduce the carbon footprint of deliveries by adopting greener delivery strategies
The practical application and policy impact of the FTC2050 project
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Fast, Green & Free Deliveries – Overcoming the last mile challenge in urban transport University of Liverpool in London, 25 June 2019
The FTC2050 project co-hosted a hackathon event ‘Parcel Hack 2019 – Hacking the Last-Mile’ on 1-2 March 2019 with CitySprint, Transport for London (TfL) and Geovation.
The event was conceived through the work of the FTC2050 project and its research with CitySprint investigating how A2B parcel deliveries may be made more sustainably, with themes relating to impact on the environment, energy, fuel consumption, traffic congestion, infrastructure and land-use. For more information on the event’s themes, see the factsheet. Two teams from UCL ultimately prevailed from 48 initial registrants.
Factsheet
CASA PhDs developed a novel, disruptive solution based on the use of crowdshipping in which existing passengers travelling to destinations inside the central London Ultra-Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) would carry out the last-leg of the delivery operation. By using existing travellers for these deliveries there would be no additional transport activity. These crowdshippers would be used to convey the goods coming from outside the ULEZ that were destined for delivery within it, removing the need for van activity for these goods movements inside ULEZ. In considering where best to locate consolidation points at which these vans could drop off their load for transhipment to crowdshippers, the team obtained passenger flow data for the London Underground (i.e. Oyster Card tap outs during the morning) and mapped the intensity of these flows against the CitySprint collection and delivery locations. The team also made use of the land assets dataset provided by TfL. From this, it was possible to identify a ranking of the most promising Underground station locations, comparing the intersection of high impact goods movements, passenger movements, and TfL space availability. The consolidation points could be locker banks or staffed reception facilities that would most likely be located outside or close to Underground stations either in kerbside space saved by reducing van traffic, on TfL-owned pavement, or in TfL-owned buildings (rather than within stations given existing space constraints).
Team CASA considered whether the existing manual allocation of CitySprint’s London collection and delivery jobs to their couriers could be automated in order to improve the consolidation of the parcel flows. Such a system would either involve holding off couriers from making deliveries (and instead making more collections in their locality) or the implementation of micro-hubs (and/or locker facilities) at which couriers could deposit and exchange parcels. This analysis requires major computation and, in order to simplify it, the team considered the linear distance between collection and delivery points rather than probable vehicle routes and trip distances and excluded any temporal analysis. Through this analysis based on clustering similar routes, the team were able to derive clusters of collection and delivery points, based on the shortest distance. They divided the clusters into five geographical zones across which micro-hubs would be implemented. This solution would ensure that customers would receive their parcels by the end of the day on which it was sent. The implementation of 154 micro-hubs (each serving 2-6 wards) was estimated to facilitate a 57% increase in courier productivity and an equivalent reduction in the number of couriers required. This would also allow CitySprint to increase its market presence by utilising these excess couriers to carry out new work that it could win. The team analysed the total collections and deliveries per day made by CitySprint from the data provided and produced maps depicting this. This showed the extent to which delivery locations were more dispersed around London than collection locations.
FTC2050 hosted a symposium to bring together a large audience of the various parties in last-mile urban deliveries.
The project generated over 20 articles directly relating to the research.
Detailed analyses and findings from the research.
Nine themed posters highlighting findings.
Over the duration of the FTC2050 project, a number of undergraduate and postgraduate (MSc) projects were undertaken relating to the project.