What Happens Before the Last Mile? Exploring a Package’s Journey

Abstract

Urban freight studies of e-commerce activities and impacts tend to focus on last-mile movements of goods. Little information is available to quantify e-commerce activity for residential deliveries of parcels upstream of the last mile. In this exploratory study, we investigate the usefulness of a novel type of data—individual package tracking records—to measure end-to-end e-commerce activity. Using a small case study, we measure distances, times, and speeds of service to characterize components of e-commerce supply chains and to understand related impacts on transportation networks. Our results detail the strengths, weaknesses, and challenges expected in using this type of data, as well as provide insights for future data collection efforts. Overall, our results indicate that package tracking records do provide information that is potentially useful to inform transportation planning, but that further efforts are needed to establish appropriate technical and institutional frameworks to support large-scale analysis.