CAREER: On the "Final 50 Feet" in Urban Delivery: Implications, Operations, and Management

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award supports research that will target and innovate system design and operational problems involved in the last segment of urban delivery, known as the “final 50 feet.” This segment, driven by the rapid growth of urban delivery, places new and significant demands on already crowded urban city streets and curbs, causing spillover effects such as extensive cruising, illegal parking, and street blockages in busy urban neighborhoods. The project will conduct economic and system-level analyses to characterize the “final 50 feet” problem in urban environments, identify the key drivers of critical issues, and evaluate the effectiveness of new policies, designs, and operations intended to address these challenges.

The research activities will be well integrated into teaching and outreach plans, to further disseminate the impacts. The project will engage public agencies to share findings and develop and complete practice-oriented discussions. Educational activities are planned to increase public scientific literacy on relevant topics and facilitate broader engagement through lab open houses, engineering student professional chapter engagement, social media channels, and research showcases.

The project will also introduce innovative course designs featuring out-of-classroom exercises aimed at enhancing both undergraduate and graduate students' ability to apply textbook methods to address newly arising problems and contexts related to the “final 50 feet.”

The project will devise a suite of analytical, numerical, and empirical tools to investigate the “final 50 feet” problem through three interconnected research axes. The first axis focuses on deliverers’ common “final 50 feet” problem by capturing their interaction with the system environment. Emphasis is placed on examining how the multiple stages composing the “final 50 feet” are interlinked and how these linkages further influence system performance and externalities.

The second axis explores the potential of non-traditional means to enhance deliverers’ work efficiency in the “final 50 feet.” This includes identifying optimal paradigms for operationalizing various non-autonomous and autonomous delivery means and determining the system conditions under which the solutions are most competitive. The third axis investigates the infrastructural and environmental contexts in which the “final 50 feet” occurs.

Prevalent and emerging infrastructural configurations, developments, and management schemes will be analyzed to assess whether and how they transform operations in the “final 50 feet” and influence multi-modal curb dynamics. Together, these three research axes connect crucial stakeholders, influencers, and game-changers involved in the “final 50 feet” in urban neighborhoods and address critical considerations for both current practices and future developments in urban mobility.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.