City Tech's Delivery Congestion Solution Featured in APA's 2020 State of Transportation Planning

The results of City Tech's Mitigating Freight Delivery Congestion project were featured in the American Planning Association's 2020 State of Transportation Planning report. Published every two years, the State of Transportation Planning provides "a platform for transportation planners, researchers and advocates to highlight innovative ideas, emerging research, current issues and success stories."

Responding to issues stemming from faster and more frequent delivery services, City Tech and partners ( HERE Technologies , Accenture , UPS , and Microsoft ) developed new data tools to create flexibility for last-mile package deliveries, with the potential to reduce traffic congestion.

Using a known congested area in Chicago as a testbed, the team analyzed UPS vehicle data to understand routes, delivery performance, and the impact on congestion. By merging traffic data and delivery activities, the pilot demonstrated opportunities for efficient, cost-effective, and congestion-reducing road-sharing for both delivery carriers and consumers.

The effort showed how multiple stakeholders can benefit from integrating delivery data and traffic mapping to understand exactly where delivery services are causing friction in cities. With this information, cities, retailers, and shippers can target specific populations and offer incentives at scale to increase delivery flexibility and reduce congestion and associated costs. In addition, cities could make data on traffic congestion and mitigation efforts easily accessible to third parties.

Download the results of City Tech's solution.

View the entire State of Transportation Planning report on the American Planning Association's website.

About the American Planning Association's State of Transportation Planning

Every two years, the Transportation Planning Division publishes the State of Transportation Planning, providing a platform for transportation planners, researchers and advocates to highlight innovative ideas, emerging research, current issues and success stories.

“ Moving People Over Cars: Mobility for Healthy Communities” is a collection of 35 articles from 60 authors focusing on issues of health, equity, advocacy, climate change, land use, goods movement and emerging technology. This report aims to amplify conversations and voices in transportation planning that center on community, justice and health.

Health is personal, it’s community-wide and it’s global. The report, in the works since July 2019, was released amidst one of the world’s most pressing health crises in the last century, and this crisis has made clear that a transportation planning approach focused on health, justice, and people is critically needed.

The State of Transportation Planning 2020 features authors from 15 states as well as from outside the US, spanning from the deserts of the Coachella Valley, to the mountains of Oregon, to the busy streets of Chicago, to the shores of Tampa. In this report, you will find articles from professional planners, researchers, advocates and students. This report has original research, first-hand accounts of successful planning practices, and thought pieces on community needs and the evolution of the practice. All articles went through a rigorous peer review process, but a key goal was also to keep authors’ voices and opinions. This report does not capture all voices, but it was designed with the hope of supporting new conversations to fill those gaps.

“Mobility for All” is the first chapter in the report, and it embodies a new hope going forward. The authors in this report build a framework for a revolution in transportation and mobility-- a people-first, health-focused, equity-centered, climate-conscious revolution.

In a time when building healthy communities is more important than ever, this is the state of transportation planning in 2020.