What's the current state of the last mile customer experience?
92% of consumers are demanding ever faster delivery. E-commerce purchases increase by 15% each year. 47% of buyers consider that the desired delivery option is rarely or never available…
That’s a lot of challenges to take on! With road traffic becoming more dense and roads less and less available for the various transport players.
Add to all this the fact that:
- 25% of greenhouse gas emissions are due to road transport
- 43% of the population takes into account the ecological aspect of transport in their consumption choices.
So if we do the math, urban delivery today would be:
- More volume,
- Faster,
- With less room to move around,
- In a more responsible way,
- And with impeccable punctuality,
Faced with this puzzle, several constraints continue to pile up: noise pollution from road traffic, road congestion in urban and peri-urban areas, road safety, etc.
The challenges for the supply chain are therefore to combat, or even eliminate, these negative externalities. The goal is to sustainably place the transport of goods in a virtuous dynamic. And to achieve this and guarantee the viability of transport players, the solutions imagined must be innovative, competitive and obviously profitable.
What if we reduced the number of miles traveled on the roads?
By reducing traditional road transport, we are already solving several problems, particularly air and noise pollution. Except that with fewer trucks and in particular Light Utility Vehicles (or LCVs for the more experienced), it is complicated to manage the increase in volumes...
Sometimes it's a good thing to consider making something new out of something old. The majority of large cities are established on rivers, the river being the only unsaturated transport network... We can easily guess the fall!
The largest warehouses are located in peri-urban areas, with transport of varying lengths to the final point of arrival. River transport allows both on-time reliability and massive movement of goods.
But that's not all for the urban delivery of tomorrow! Once the goods arrive safely, they need to be transported to an urban area for the last kilometer. The challenge of combined transport or multimodal transport consists of limiting the cost of outage. The transition of goods from the boat to another mode of transport must then be facilitated and several possibilities are available to us. Different innovations are then being developed concerning handling methods or container formats... You must therefore stay connected to find out more about the future connected swap bodies that may be offered.
How to ensure sustainable last mile transport?
Cities are increasingly moving towards reducing public space dedicated to vehicles with high carbon emissions and favoring soft modes of transport.
It is then a question of distinguishing the largest objects which require trucks and the objects which are easier to transport. To reduce the negative externalities of trucks, two options that may be viable for the moment:
- The electric truck which has the constraint of a fairly limited autonomy (around 120km)
- The BioNGV truck which emits much less than a classic thermal truck, without the problem of autonomy but with the concern of sourcing BioNGV
The advantage of using multi-modality is to be able to use these vehicles only in urban areas and therefore limit the constraint that accompanies them.
For lighter objects (up to around 150 kilos), we see more and more cargo bikes filling public spaces. They have the advantage of easy access to even the narrowest streets without obstructing the roads.
Some are electrically assisted to relieve delivery personnel (this is what we recommend at Box2Home), and others are 100% gentle mobility for the city (therefore for the lightest couriers).
And the big forgotten ones in urban logistics?
To discuss sustainable urban logistics in its entirety, it is difficult not to talk about the returns policy with possible empty journeys as well as user recovery.
Today, there are an estimated 25% of goods transport trucks traveling empty according to the National Roads Committee. One of the advantages that we can find in multi-modality is, for example, the presence of recycling points next to the largest warehouses. A solution which has already been chosen by many carriers to continue the effort on sustainable mobility.
This is the case, for example, of the organization of the recovery of electrical waste and electronic equipment (WEEE), which is more often taken care of by transporters.
The future of urban delivery is directly linked to the evolution of the circular economy in our societies, and it has become essential that logistics players take ownership of it.
To know more : www.box2home
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