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Switching to Off-Peak Delivery Times Reduces City Congestion

posted by on Thursday May 25 2017, @02:13AM   
from the obvious dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

In some businesses like supermarkets and restaurants, local restrictions on nighttime deliveries leave distributors no choice but to dispatch trucks during morning rush hours. But lifting these rules could reduce peak traffic volumes and increase transport efficiency, according to a recent study involving researchers from KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

Some communities prohibit heavy trucks from operating during the night. Stockholm is one of them, but the city wanted to test if lifting its ban might yield some benefits in transportation efficiency. Anna Pernestål Brenden, a researcher at KTH's Integrated Transport Research Laboratory, and acoustic, transport efficiency, and policy researchers from the KTH, joined with other partners in a pilot study with the City of Stockholm to see if lifting the 10 to 6 a.m. ban on truck deliveries made sense.

They worked with a national supermarket chain and its suburban Stockholm central warehouse, as well as with a company that supplied food to restaurants and hotels, Pernestål Brenden says.

Ordinarily the supermarket warehouse, which is some 30km north of Stockholm, would deploy several fully-loaded trucks to make deliveries during peak morning rush hours from 6 to 8, because there is no way for one truck to make them all in that short a time span.

But in the study, a single truck delivered goods to three stores in central Stockholm between the prohibited hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. It would return to the warehouse three times in the night to be reloaded, and then make its subsequent delivery, she says. "That's one truck doing the work of three, or in other words – morning commuters are spared having to share the road with three heavy duty trucks."

Though it was a small scale study, Pernestål Brenden says there are strong indications that scaling up off-peak deliveries could increase business efficiency for suppliers and retailers, reduce fuel consumption and CO2 emissions and perhaps make a positive impact on traffic volume during peak morning hours.

Fewer drivers will clock fewer hours.

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Original Submission

• Lex Julia Municipalis Lex Julia Municipalis (Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @04:07AM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @04:07AM (#515272)

  14) After January 1 next no one shall drive a wagon along the streets of Rome or along those streets in the suburbs where there is continuous housing after sunrise or before the tenth hour of the day, except whatever will be proper for the transportation and the importation of material for building temples of the immortal gods, or for public works, or for removing from the city rubbish from those buildings for whose demolition public contracts have been let. For these purposes permission shall be granted by this law to specified persons to drive wagons for the reasons stated.
  15) Whenever it is proper for the vestal virgins, the king of the sacrifices, or the flamens to ride in the city for the purpose of official sacrifices of the Roman people; whatever wagons are proper for a triumphal procession when any one triumphs; whatever wagons are proper for public games within Rome or within one mile of Rome or for the procession held at the time of the games in the Circus Maximus, it is not the intent of this law to prevent the use of such wagons during the day within the city for these occasions and at these times.
  16) It is not the intent of this law to prevent ox wagons or donkey wagons that have been driven into the city by night from going out empty or from carrying out dung from within the city of Rome or within one mile of the city after sunrise until the tenth hour of the day.

  http://droitromain.upmf-grenoble.fr/Anglica/heracleensis_johnson.html [upmf-grenoble.fr]

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• Re:Lex Julia Municipalis (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @04:49AM

  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @04:49AM (#515288)

  Once again the Roman Empire proves to have been more civilized than the Terrorist American Empire Of Evil.

  Parent