The New York City Off-Hour Delivery Program

Jose Holguin-Veras, et al., The New York City Off-Hour Delivery Program: A Business and Community-Friendly Sustainability Program, Interfaces, Volume 48, Issue 1, January-February 2018, pp. 70–86.

The New York City Off-Hour Delivery (NYC OHD) program is the work of a private-public-academic partnership—a collaborative effort of leading private-sector groups and companies, public-sector agencies led by the New York City Department of Transportation, and research partners led by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The efforts of this partnership have induced more than 400 commercial establishments in NYC to accept OHD without supervision. The economic benefits are considerable: the carriers have reduced operational costs and parking fines by 45 percent; the receivers enjoy more reliable deliveries, enabling them to reduce inventory levels; the truck drivers have less stress, shorter work hours, and easier deliveries and parking; the delivery trucks produce 55–67 percent less emissions than they would during regular-hour deliveries, for a net reduction of 2.5 million tons of CO2 per year; and citizens’ quality of life increases as a result of reduced conflicts between delivery trucks, cars, bicycles, and pedestrians, and through the use of low-noise delivery practices and technologies that minimize the impacts of noise. The total economic benefits exceed $20 million per year. The success of the OHD program is due largely to the policy design at its core, made possible with the behavioral microsimulation. This unique optimization-simulation system incorporates the research conducted into an operations research/management science tool that assesses the effectiveness of alternative policy designs. This enabled the successful implementation of the project within the most complex urban environment in the United States.

Key

For a policy to be effective, it must be based on a solid understanding of how the intended target is likely to respond. To this effect, the team conducted a substantial amount of behavior research to determine how receivers and carriers would respond to policy measures intended to foster OHD, and the team integrated its findings into an optimization-simulation tool we created, the Behavioral Micro-Simulation tool (BMS). This tool enabled the team to identify the most appropriate policy design and estimate the OHD market share that could be achieved. The BMS assesses the effects of alternative policy designs by modeling the receiver decisions in response to incentives and the carrier decisions in response to the receivers’ choices. 

Estimation

To estimate the average cost and emission reductions, the authors selected six delivery routes (two during regular hours and four during off-hours) from a vendor making food deliveries to restaurants in NYC. These data were selected because they enable a solid comparison of the performance of OHD versus regular-hour delivery. In addition, because these data had been used to estimate emission reductions using state-of-the-art emission models, the emission results published in Holguín-Veras et al. (2016) could be used directly. 

To obtain the delivery costs, GPS data were postprocessed to compute the distance and time of travel between consecutive GPS readings, which were multiplied by cost-per-unit distance ($0.61 per km) and per-unit time ($45.13 per hour) to obtain the generalized cost.