Seattle pilots project to reduce emissions in delivery services

The University of Washington and its Urban Freight Lab have collaborated with the Seattle Department of Transportation to launch a neighborhood "microhub," a central spot where consumers can pick up goods and companies can make zero-emissions last-mile deliveries.

The Seattle Neighborhood Delivery Hub is operating as a pilot project in a parking lot in the city's Uptown neighborhood to test new vehicles, business models and technologies aimed at reducing overall emissions in delivery services.

"Our members wanted to come together and collaborate on a space that would allow them to test and evaluate ... novel last-mile delivery services ... outside of the lab in an independent way," explained Anne Goodchild, professor of Civil Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington and founder of the Urban Freight Lab, a public-private research group that helps develop strategies for managing goods deliveries in urban areas.

The delivery hub includes a ghost kitchen, where food is prepared for delivery orders; a common-carrier parcel locker, which provides residents with secure and contactless package delivery from all major carriers; and a service that delivers packages within a 2-mile radius of the hub using cargo bikes.

Companies that participate in the delivery hub include AxleHire, a delivery and logistics routing software service; Coaster Cycles, an electric-bicycle delivery service; the General Motors-owned BrightDrop, an EV-based delivery service that operates electrically propelled pallets to deliver goods; and Reef Technology, a logistics company that focuses on transforming urban spaces into neighborhood hubs.

The Uptown neighborhood delivery hub is an essential part of Seattle's overall strategy to reduce climate emissions, outlined in the city's Clean Transportation Electrification Blueprint, which includes a goal of transitioning 30 percent of delivery services for all goods to zero emissions by 2030.

Goodchild said one of the key elements of the hub, which officially launched early this year, is the flexibility of the program and the collaborative experiential approach to finding ways to curb emissions.

"We need to do everything we can to be reducing emissions, so I'm just really grateful for that community of experimenters," Goodchild said. "Those are the people that are going to come up with new ways of doing things that we all benefit from. And if we're not experimenting, we're not going to find them."