Purpose: This paper assesses the parking needs of freight and service related commercial activities and identifies the role of demand management in mitigating these needs. Methods:To provide a context for the analyses, the authors selected two small commercial areas of about the same number of commercial establishments-one in Troy, NY, and the other in New York City-and applied freight and service trip generation models to estimate the total freight and service traffic generated at these sites. Then, using different assumptions of the amount of time these vehicles spend at a parking location, the authors estimated the number of parking spaces required by time of day under different assumptions of demand management. Results:The results show that parking needs are proportional to the average parking durations. Essentially, the longer the duration the higher the parking needs. In terms of impacts on demand management, the results show that the 100% Off-Hour Deliveries (OHD) program is expected to be the most impactful as it reduces the parking needs by 70-80% during peak hours. In second place, Staggered Deliveries reduces parking needs by about 60% during the peak hours. The third place is occupied by the 30% OHD Scenario and the Receiver-Led Consolidation programs, which are virtually tied, offering about 10-25% reduction. Conclusions:The initial analysis revealed the importance of parking duration as it was shown to be proportional to parking needs; the longer the duration the higher the need for parking. The delivery simulation further bolstered this finding by showing that the optimal case occurs (i.e. minimizing parking duration) the closer the parking location is to the establishment. The further away the vehicle is parked the longer the walking time to the establishment, hence increasing the time the vehicle occupies the parking spot. The strategies applied to the case studies showed that Transportation Demand Management (TDM) strategies are effective in decreasing the number of parking spots needed during peak periods.

Land-use planning and policymaking is central to how communities manage their economic activity and the social and environmental impacts these activities produce. Because of this central role, enhancing land-use practices to better incorporate the needs and impacts of freight activity has strong potential to improve the efficiency of their associated supply chains. This paper summarizes the key findings of the NCFRP 08-111 project on “Freight-Efficient Land Uses (FELUs)”, probably the most comprehensive research project to date aimed at designing policy procedures to foster land-uses that minimize the private and external costs associated with the production, transportation, and consumption of goods. As part of the paper, the authors define freight efficient land-uses, identify the principles that should guide the process towards FELUs, outline the process to develop FELU plans and programs, propose to analyze the freight efficiency of current and future land uses in their jurisdictions, and identify complementary initiatives (both land-use and transportation related) that could help mitigate the negative impacts on local communities. The authors discuss three illustrative cases that provide evidence on how land-use decisions produce unintended effects on local communities. The paper explains how decision makers can carefully consider the FELU principles in their planning and avoid or mitigate such negative results.

The New York City Off-Hour Delivery (NYC OHD) program is the work of a private-public-academic partnership—a collaborative effort of leading private-sector groups and companies, public-sector agencies led by the New York City Department of Transportation, and research partners led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The efforts of this partnership have induced more than 400 commercial establishments in NYC to accept OHD without supervision. The economic benefits are considerable: the carriers have reduced operational costs and parking fines by 45 percent; the receivers enjoy more reliable deliveries, enabling them to reduce inventory levels; the truck drivers have less stress, shorter work hours, and easier deliveries and parking; the delivery trucks produce 55–67 percent less emissions than they would during regular-hour deliveries, for a net reduction of 2.5 million tons of CO2 per year; and citizens’ quality of life increases as a result of reduced conflicts between delivery trucks, cars, bicycles, and pedestrians, and through the use of low-noise delivery practices and technologies that minimize the impacts of noise. The total economic benefits exceed $20 million per year. The success of the OHD program is due largely to the policy design at its core, made possible with the behavioral microsimulation. This unique optimization-simulation system incorporates the research conducted into an operations research/management science tool that assesses the effectiveness of alternative policy designs. This enabled the successful implementation of the project within the most complex urban environment in the United States.

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