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

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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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @05:41AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 25 2017, @05:41AM (#515305)

    Day shift workers need to check their privledge. They have discriminatory laws to protect their precious quiet sleepy-weepy time, and then they all simultaneously run their lawn mowers when night shift workers are trying to sleep.

    Shift-ism is going to be the next big thing in victimhood. The oppression of night shift workers must come to an end. Why, I can't even access critical government services paid for by my tax dollars. I went to the public library at 3AM; it was closed!

    When I went to the bakery to order my wedding cake at 3AM, the doors were locked! The gays sued and got their wedding cake. Now where's my cake? I'm going to sue!

    #JusticeIs24/7

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