Fixing the delivery truck problem

In an article about the impact of increased e-commerce on urban congestion, Eric Jaffe looks at some possible solutions:

At the core of the problem is street parking. In a dense urban area like Manhattan, where few buildings have the luxury of freight docks or loading zones, delivery trucks have little choice but to park at the curb. That leaves passenger vehicles and delivery trucks to duke it out for precious street-parking space, which in turn leads to double-parking, which in turn leads to general congestion. ...

There are some other remedies in the works. Some cities (including New York) have experimented with late-night commercial deliveries, though that requires a lot of manpower and might create too much noise for residential buildings. Other cities, including London and Paris, have tried shifting deliveries to bicycles, though that has obvious limitations of its own. Little "freight villages" — places where trucks can more or less park for the day — might do the trick but would occupy valuable city real estate.

Woodard believes the best response may be some combination of priced parking and highly enforced on-street loading zones. For now, though, he simply wants cities to recognize the extent of the problem.

One of the proposed remedies that Jaffe cites:

TNT is modeling a new distribution model for Brussels that it calls the "mobile depot." In this system, which works similarly to the BentoBox, a trailer containing a large number of parcels is towed to a central location in the city during off hours. Parcels are delivered by last-mile drivers in small electric or human-powered vehicles. If a few of these mobile depots could be dropped in strategic locations around the city, package trucks, which currently use surface streets and highways en route to distribution hubs located outside the city, could be eliminated.

TNT's "mobile depot" concept