Abstract
E-commerce has facilitated online ordering of goods by households in recent years. This technological advancement has disrupted shopping related transportation. While the National Household Travel Survey (NHTS [1]) finds that household shopping frequency has declined in the last 10-20 years, deliveries by parcel delivery trucks and vans [2] have increased. However, the net effect of these phenomena on overall trip making, vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and fuel consumption has not been quantified. From a regional planning perspective, understanding the net effect is important for informing city policies—for example, in regards to land use and transportation planning. The objective of this research is to address this gap. In this study, the net regional impact of e-commerce on transportation and fuel consumption is evaluated. The approach relies on a powerful, agent-based modeling framework (POLARIS [3]) that models decisions made by individual household and commercial agents. E-commerce demand is modeled for each household using a bilevel multinomial probit structure that evaluates e-commerce participation and ordering frequency. Last-mile delivery tours were constructed using GIS-based tools and information from a major parcel delivery company [4]. After integrating the resulting supply and demand models with all other passenger and commercial traffic within POLARIS, a traffic simulation was performed and subsequently VMT and energy consumption were analyzed. The study finds that while e-commerce has generated an increase in parcel truck delivery trips, the net effect of e-commerce is a reduction in VMT and fuel consumption due major reductions in these quantities via shopping trip reductions.
