Dr. Anne Goodchild to Speak at GT Seminar

Title: "Moving Goods to Consumers: Land Use Patterns, Logistics, and Emissions"

Abstract: There is a potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by replacing passenger vehicle travel with delivery service. These reductions are possible because, while delivery vehicles have higher rates of greenhouse gas emissions than private light-duty vehicles, the routing of delivery vehicles to customers requires less VMT than those customers travelling independently. In addition to lowering travel-associated greenhouse gas emissions, because of their tendency to occur during off-peak hours, delivery services have the potential to reduce congestion. Thus, replacing passenger vehicle travel with delivery service provides opportunity to address global concerns - greenhouse gas emissions and congestion.  

While addressing the impact of transportation on greenhouse gas emissions is critical, transportation also produces significant levels of criteria pollutants, which impact the health of those in the immediate area. These impacts are of particular concern in urban areas, which due to their constrained land availability increase proximity of residents to the roadway network. This presentation addresses whether replacing passenger vehicle travel with delivery service can address both concerns simultaneously. In other words, can replacing passenger travel with delivery service reduce congestion and CO2 emissions as well as selected criteria pollutants? Further, does the design of the delivery service impacts the results? Lastly, how do these impacts differ in rural versus urban land use patterns?  

This work models the amount of VMT, CO2, NOx, and PM10 generated by personal travel and delivery vehicles in a number of different development patterns and in a number of different scenarios, including various warehouse locations. In all scenarios, VMT is reduced through the use of delivery service, and in all scenarios, NOx and PM10 are lowest when passenger vehicles are used for the last mile of travel. The goods movement scheme that results in the lowest generation of CO2, however, varies by municipality.  Regression models for each goods movement scheme and models that compare sets of goods movement schemes were developed. These results allow for a comparison of the impacts of greenhouse gas emissions in the form of CO2 to local criteria pollutants (NOx and PM10) for each scenario. These efforts will contribute to increased integration of goods movement in urban planning, inform policies designed to mitigate the impacts of goods movement vehicles, and provide insights into achieving sustainability targets, especially as online shopping and goods delivery becomes more prevalent.

Anne Goodchild is the Allan and Inger Osberg Endowed Associate Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington.  Anne Goodchild joined the faculty of the University of Washington in December 2005 after completing her PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering at UC at Berkeley. Her research interests lie in the analysis of logistic systems, with an emphasis on freight transportation.  Recent research has evaluated CO2 emissions in strategic routing and schedule planning in urban pick-up and delivery systems, policy and technology implementations to improve intermodal interfaces, and the relationship between freight activity and the economy.  In addition, a series of recent projects include primary data collection and analysis to build knowledge and algorithms for next generation freight models.  Before attending Berkeley she worked in consulting for 5 years in Europe and North America, for PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and Applied Decision Analysis Inc., modeling business problems such as airline fleet maintenance scheduling. She holds an MS in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the UC at Berkeley, and a BS (with High Honors) in Mathematics from the UC at Davis.  She serves as Chair of TRB’s Intermodal Freight Transportation committee.

Link to her UW website