SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday May 25 2017, @02:41PM (1 child)
Sorry, I've only driven past it, never into it. I think I said "major city". Fresno counts as a "major city", San Francisco, Sacramento, LA, and several other California towns and cities. 50,000 population is about the same size as the city I grew up in, and we certainly didn't think of our hometown as a "major city". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Castle%2C_Pennsylvania [wikipedia.org]
Oh - I said my hometown was about 50,000? You have to read down pretty far to find that "In 1950, the population peaked at 48,834, but became part of the rust belt, with population dwindling to 28,334 by 1990. New Castle is the County Seat of Lawrence County which has a population of approximately 100,000."
(Score: 2) by julian on Thursday May 25 2017, @05:26PM
I forget the official population is that low. I guess the university isn't counted. The surrounding cities are also growing together into one contiguous urban/suburban sprawl.
Driving into LA has been a nightmare no matter what time of the day or night, and it feels like it goes on for hundreds of kilometers.