80% of Goods Start or End in Cities. It’s Time We Start Taking Urban Freight Seriously.

This is part one of our series on urban freight and achieving a “triple zero” bottom-line: zero emissions, zero road deaths and zero exclusion from core services and opportunities.
A line of trucks files patiently into the Port of Shenzhen. A delivery driver straps groceries to the back of their motorcycle in Kampala. A truck stops to unload in a bicycle lane in downtown Seattle....
“Logistics hotels,” as warehouses like Chapelle International are called, herald a new way of doing freight, says Laetitia Dablanc, a researcher on logistics at Université Gustave Eiffel in Paris. Major shipping companies like Amazon are reclaiming formerly abandoned spaces like railyards, parking garages and even shopping malls to nudge distribution centers closer to consumers’ doorsteps.