Growth in e-commerce has led to increasing use of light goods vehicles for parcel deliveries in urban areas. This paper provides an insight into the reasons behind this growth and the resulting effort required to meet the exacting delivery services offered by e-retailers which often lead to poor vehicle utilisation in the last-mile operation, as well as the duplication of delivery services in urban centres as competitors vie for business. A case study investigating current parcel delivery operations in central London identified the scale of the challenge facing the last-mile parcel delivery driver, highlighting the importance of walking which can account for 62% of the total vehicle round time and 40% of the total round distance in the operations studied. The characteristics of these operations are in direct conflict with the urban infrastructure which is being increasingly redesigned in favour of walking, cycling and public transport, reducing the kerbside accessibility for last-mile operations. The paper highlights other pressures on last-mile operators associated with managing seasonal peaks in demand; reduced lead times between customers placing orders and deliveries being made; meeting delivery time windows; first-time delivery failure rates and the need to manage high levels of product returns. It concludes by describing a range of initiatives that retailers and parcel carriers, sometimes in conjunction with city authorities, can implement to reduce the costs associated with last-mile delivery, without negatively impacting on customer service levels

Using information gathered from some 30 UK surveys undertaken over the last 15years, this paper provides planners with an understanding of road-based urban retail freight transport activity. The findings suggest that the average High Street business could expect up to 10 core goods and 7.6 service visits per week, in non-peak trading periods with 25% additional activity during the build up to Christmas. Vans (‘light goods vehicles’) were the dominant mode, responsible for 42% of delivery activity with a mean dwell time of 10min. Where possible, load consolidation should be encouraged by methods such as Delivery and Servicing Plans and using out-of-town freight consolidation centres to bring in goods over the last mile in shared vehicles. Where this is not possible, loading bay monitoring and control, and preferred lorry routes can help manage the movement of vehicles in and out of dense urban areas.Service vehicle activity is a significant contributor to urban freight movements and often requires vehicles to be parked close to the premises being served. Centrally coordinating elements of service provision (e.g. for cleaning, equipment maintenance, recyclate collection), or providing improved, more flexible parking provision for service vehicles could be as or more beneficial in reducing overall freight impacts than focusing on core goods deliveries. In the case of the latter, ‘pay-as-you-leave’ car park charging systems could encourage short-stay service vehicles to park off-street

The impacts of failed first-time home deliveries on additional carrier journeys (repeat deliveries) and customer trips (to retrieve goods from carrier depots) are of increasing concern to e-retailers and are assessed in this paper. The attended collection and delivery point (CDP) concept is one solution to first-time delivery failures, using a variety of outlets (e.g., convenience stores, petrol stations, post offices) as alternative addresses to receive deliveries. By using a database of households from across West Sussex in the United Kingdom, this paper confirms that certain benefits might accrue from using networks of Local Collect post offices, supermarkets, and railway stations as CDPs, compared with the traditional delivery method in which the carrier may make several rede-livery attempts to the home with the customer making a personal trip to the carrier's depot in the event that these attempts also fail. A network of CDPs across West Sussex would function most effectively (in reducing the overall traveling costs associated with handling failed first-time deliveries) when the proportion of first-time home delivery failures is greater than 20%, the proportion of customers traveling to the depot is more than 30%, Local Collect post offices are used as CDPs, and significant numbers of people would walk to their local CDP. Customers benefit the most from CDPs, with reductions in their current traveling costs of up to 90% being modeled here. The reduction in carrier traveling costs is much less, but the processing costs associated with home delivery failures are reduced significantly by diverting the failed packages to CDPs.

This paper presents an analysis of the vehicle mileage incurred by carriers and customers using local collection/delivery points (CDPs) for failed first time home shopping deliveries compared with the traditional carrier redelivery method. A number of key factors were identified, including the delivery failure rate, the carrier depot distance from the delivery area, the number of available collection points, the preferred modes of transport used by householders and the extent to which trips were combined with each other. The results of a case study using CDPs in the city of Winchester, UK, indicated that customer mileage could be reduced by over 80%, while the estimated impact on carrier mileage was negligible. Worst-case and best-case scenarios for the collection point delivery method were also modelled, which demonstrated that overall mileage could be reduced by 80% or increased by 40% depending on the assumptions made about the key factors.

Unlike much of the previous research on this topic, which assesses the economic consequences of failed deliveries to the home, this study examines the issue of failed delivery from a carbon-auditing perspective. It considers the potential environmental savings from the use of alternative forms of collection and delivery over traditional delivery methods for failed home deliveries. With a spreadsheet carbon audit model, carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions for a failed delivery are calculated on the basis of a typical van home delivery round of 120 drops and 50-mi (80-km) distance. Three first-time delivery failure rates (10%, 30%, and 50%) are assessed. The additional CO₂ from a second delivery attempt increases the emissions per drop by 9% to 75% (depending on the delivery failure rate). The vast majority (85% to 95%) of emissions emanating from a traditional failed delivery arise not from the repeat van delivery but from the personal travel associated with the customer's collecting a missed redelivery from the carrier's local depot. A range of collection–delivery points (CDPs) (supermarkets, post offices, railway stations) were all found to reduce the environmental impact of this personal travel. Post offices (currently operating a CDP system through the U.K. Royal Mail's Local Collect service) yielded the greatest savings, creating just 13% of the CO₂ produced by a traditional collection by car from a local depot. Overall, the research suggests that the use of CDPs offers a convenient and more environmentally friendly alternative to redelivery and customer collection from a local parcel depot.