This paper assesses the parking needs of freight and service related commercial activities and identifies the role of demand management in mitigating these needs. To provide a context for the analyses, the authors selected two small commercial areas of about the same number of commercial establishments—one in Troy, NY, and the other in New York City—and applied freight and service trip generation models to estimate the total freight and service traffic generated at these sites. Then, using different assumptions of the amount of time these vehicles spend at a parking location, the authors estimated the number of parking spaces required by time of day under different assumptions of demand management. The results show that parking needs are proportional to the average parking durations. Essentially, the longer the duration the higher the parking needs. In terms of impacts on demand management, the results show that the 100% Off-Hour Deliveries (OHD) program is expected to be the most impactful as it reduces the parking needs by 70–80% during peak hours. In second place, Staggered Deliveries reduces parking needs by about 60% during the peak hours. The third place is occupied by the 30% OHD Scenario and the Receiver-Led Consolidation programs, which are virtually tied, offering about 10–25% reduction. The initial analysis revealed the importance of parking duration as it was shown to be proportional to parking needs; the longer the duration the higher the need for parking. The delivery simulation further bolstered this finding by showing that the optimal case occurs (i.e. minimizing parking duration) the closer the parking location is to the establishment. The further away the vehicle is parked the longer the walking time to the establishment, hence increasing the time the vehicle occupies the parking spot. The strategies applied to the case studies showed that Transportation Demand Management (TDM) strategies are effective in decreasing the number of parking spots needed during peak periods.

The New York City Off-Hour Delivery (NYC OHD) program is the work of a private-public-academic partnership—a collaborative effort of leading private-sector groups and companies, public-sector agencies led by the New York City Department of Transportation, and research partners led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The efforts of this partnership have induced more than 400 commercial establishments in NYC to accept OHD without supervision. The economic benefits are considerable: the carriers have reduced operational costs and parking fines by 45 percent; the receivers enjoy more reliable deliveries, enabling them to reduce inventory levels; the truck drivers have less stress, shorter work hours, and easier deliveries and parking; the delivery trucks produce 55–67 percent less emissions than they would during regular-hour deliveries, for a net reduction of 2.5 million tons of CO₂ per year; and citizens’ quality of life increases as a result of reduced conflicts between delivery trucks, cars, bicycles, and pedestrians, and through the use of low-noise delivery practices and technologies that minimize the impacts of noise. The total economic benefits exceed $20 million per year. The success of the OHD program is due largely to the policy design at its core, made possible with the behavioral microsimulation. This unique optimization-simulation system incorporates the research conducted into an operations research/management science tool that assesses the effectiveness of alternative policy designs. This enabled the successful implementation of the project within the most complex urban environment in the United States.

This paper seeks to pilot test a novel way to collect freight and service activity data and analyze the collected data in the metropolitan area of Medellin, Colombia. This research collects data using a multi-layer and multi-actor approach that includes surveys to receivers, suppliers, carriers, and truck drivers. The data are used by the authors to describe the overall freight patterns in the area of study and to show lessons learned. The data collection resulted in 2947 establishments (4.4% of the total establishments in the city), a cordon survey of 2950 commercial vehicles (17% of the total vehicle volume) accessing the urban area, and carrier interviews to ten companies and 130 truck drivers. The results indicate that a total of 33,274 metric tons/day enter the study area, 35,240 tons/day leave the area; while 7000 tons/day are distributed in the study area. In terms of freight trips, 6600 trips/day enter the study zone and 6600 trips/day leave it. The data collection effort enabled the analyses of freight generation patterns. The freight surveys used in the study complement each other, and provided a good depiction of the freight movements in urban areas. It was found that in the Medellin Metropolitan Area, freight-intensive sector establishments generates, on average, significantly more cargo (freight attraction plus production) than the service-intensive sectors. The analyses of the surveys allow the decision makers to understand the nature of the cargo and the generation patterns in different type of establishments. This characterization of the freight patterns is vital for the forecasting of the behavior of the cargo and it is the main input to perform freight demand modeling for city planning, especially for developing countries, where there are too many budget constraints.