Delivering the Goods: NYC Urban Freight in the Age of E-Commerce was developed by AIA New York Chapter’s (AIANY) Freight and Logistics Working Group. The working group was composed of members of three AIANY committees: Planning and Urban Design; Transportation and Infrastructure; and Committee on the Environment (COTE). CfZWD Director Clare Miflin was the COTE representative, responsible for looking at the impacts of waste movement and transfer within the city.
This interdisciplinary working group looked at the complex challenges that arise from New York City’s movement of 365 million tons of freight each year, and included planners, designers, architects, academics, and traffic engineers. The report studies the impacts of urban freight on New York City and offers innovative and equitable solutions to counter the burdens imposed on communities by the movement of goods in the city.
In developing the document, the task force interviewed a broad range of stakeholders and held listening sessions to understand best practices in other cities as well as local community, industry, and agency perspectives. Current-state goods movement scenarios are presented, followed by system scale strategies and site scale strategies, developed with Stantec, illustrating opportunities to improve land use and curb management. The approach places special consideration on “the Interface”—the spaces of greatest impact where goods movement intersects with place-making, where public meets private, and where transportation overlaps with land use. The document concludes with a set of short- and long-term recommendations for how to transform goods movement in the city over the coming decades.
System scale strategies included mode shifting, consolidation, decentralization and circularity. In the current linear economy, freight and waste are two separate systems: new goods come in and garbage is sent away. In a circular economy products can be reused, repaired, or recycled. For this to happen, freight and waste need to be integrated into a single circular goods movement system. Decentralizing this system allows for smaller local transport loops which can have positive impacts on neighborhoods.
Site-scale strategies are illustrated by Stantec to show how the last-mile interface, at the block level, can be adapted into staging areas that co-locate freight deliveries with food deliveries, residential and commercial waste collection, and loading zones. Prototypes were developed for different types of streets, including the one illustrated below for a medium to high density two-way street with bike lanes either side.