Last-Mile Strategies for Urban Freight Delivery: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Trends in retail and e-commerce have led to greater demand for urban freight and last-mile deliveries. This is a concern for urban planners, parcel carriers, and citizens as they struggle to cope with the demands that increased freight flows create in an urban context. This topic has also seen a corresponding expansion in the academic literature as researchers propose solutions to the problem of last-mile delivery. We conduct a systematic review of the literature to identify innovative last-mile delivery strategies as well as ways that those strategies are evaluated by researchers. This study will help academics as they consider directing future research as well as practitioners as they assess how delivery patterns may shift. We identify 22 last-mile delivery strategies and group them into four categories: innovative vehicles, urban goods consolidation, technological and routing advances in city logistics, and emerging planning tools and policies. We find that urban consolidation centers, freight bicycles, and collaborative logistics are the strategies that have received the most attention to date. Analyses of these options has focused on operational, environmental, social, and economic impacts with operational efficiency, emissions, and congestion being the three evaluation criteria discussed most in the literature. We propose that safety has not been adequately considered as a means for evaluating last-mile delivery strategies and should be a higher-priority focus for urban freight research going forward.