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    <copyright>Copyright © 2026. National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.</copyright>
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    <managingEditor>tris-trb@nas.edu (Bill McLeod)</managingEditor>
    <webMaster>tris-trb@nas.edu (Bill McLeod)</webMaster>
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      <title>Last-Mile Warehousing and Fulﬁllment Development in North Carolina: Safety, Trafﬁc, and Quality of Life Impacts</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/2491049</link>
      <description><![CDATA[Expansion of e-commerce, especially throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, has rapidly changed the way goods reach customers’ homes. As the volume of parcels has surged (from 15.4 billion in 2019 to 21.7 billion in 2021), e-commerce companies like Amazon continue to expand their logistics footprint to match demand by building warehousing and fulfillment centers. This development reflects an industry shift from a national distribution model to a regional model, which positions a wider array of goods closer to North Carolina’s population centers. While this shift enables faster, cheaper shipping of goods to customers, it entails substantial impacts on transportation patterns, infrastructure use, safety, and quality of life. For example, locating facilities closer to population centers means increased volumes of linehaul transport, delivery vans, and employee traffic in areas previously unaccustomed to these uses. Moreover, there is concern over illegal overnight truck parking on state roads, as these facilities attract trucks but do not provide overnight parking for trucking.

This project will: a) examine current development approval processes for warehousing in North Carolina; and b) analyze and document the impacts that these developments are having on traffic volumes, safety, and quality of life. The research team addresses these goals specifically by examining emerging siting patterns, development/approval processes, traffic volume and crash data, and impacts on surrounding communities of fulfillment centers and delivery stations in North Carolina. Based on these impacts, the research team will provide guidance for future Traffic Impact Analysis (TIA) and approval processes for these facilities.

These issues are of critical importance to the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT) in several ways, but most crucially in that a) NCDOT is responsible for design and oversight of TIA on state roads, b) NCDOT is often called upon to fund extensive road infrastructure projects to support new fulfillment centers, c) NCDOT is financially and logistically responsible for maintaining road infrastructure that serves these centers, and d) improving traffic safety, including that related to commercial vehicles, is a key priority for NCDOT. Moreover, these goals have been recently highlighted in the context of freight in NCDOT’s Statewide Multimodal Freight Plan. These issues are also of critical importance to a broad spectrum of North Carolina communities. Rural communities are often chosen for siting due to cheap land and ease of approval processes, and can see radical transformations in traffic volumes, affecting safety, air quality, and nearby residents. Urban communities, meanwhile, are often the target markets for these last-mile facilities, and can thereby endure increased commercial traffic volumes, congestion, safety issues, and a documented increasing problem with illegal long haul truck parking. The research team's investigation will provide NCDOT, local municipalities, and other partners with insights to make future decisions about siting, as well as to design long term policy to accommodate the continued growth of e-commerce and the infrastructure that supports it.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Wed, 15 Jan 2025 16:11:32 GMT</pubDate>
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      <title>Southeast Los Angeles (SELA) Initiative
</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1637647</link>
      <description><![CDATA[SELA region is 62 square miles and includes 11 cities, 4 unincorporated areas, a high proportion of manufacturing and warehousing, and major highway and rail facilities serving port related freight (Figure 1). The population is majority Hispanic, generally low income, and classified by the state’s primary environmental burden mapping tool, CalEnviroScreen, as having high pollution burden. This case study is motivated by and leverages an earlier analysis of the area conducted by USC in 2017 in collaboration with the CSULA Pat Brown Institute and the SELA Collaborative, a partnership of 11 community and non-profit organizations (Giuliano et al, 2018). The research subtasks performed as part of this proposal are based on the above mentioned analysis and community input, including input received at a November 2017 community summit that gathered over 250 local elected officials, civic leaders, and community members. There are two main research subtasks in this the SELA initiative research plan and one engagement and outreach subtask.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Thu, 11 Jul 2019 17:39:32 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1637647</guid>
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      <title>Analysis of Carbon Emission Regulations in Supply Chains with Volatile Demand- Missouri S&amp;T</title>
      <link>https://rip.trb.org/View/1318017</link>
      <description><![CDATA[The objective of this research is to evaluate the impact of carbon emission regulations on supply chains with volatile demand. Supply chain operations such as inventory holding, freight transportation, logistics, and warehousing activities are major contributors to emissions for manufacturing, retailing, transportation, health, and service industries. Therefore, it is crucial that supply chain agents plan their operations with environmental considerations. Recently, several forms of carbon emission regulations have been proposed and/or implemented to reduce emissions. This research will model and solve a supply chain agent's operations planning problem under two well-known carbon regulations: carbon-taxing and carbon-cap-and-trade. The growing literature on "green" supply chains and emissions is nearly exclusively focused on settings with deterministic demand. To better capture practical aspects of supply chains/logistics, our research will formulate an integrated inventory control and transportation model with stochastic demand under the  aforementioned carbon regulations. This model will be solved using engineering management/operations research concepts. This project will provide decision-making algorithms to help supply chain agents better manage inventory and transportation in light of economic and environmental pressures in the presence of demand volatility. The theoretical modeling and sensitivity analysis will be complimented with a pilot case study using a Missouri firm.]]></description>
      <pubDate>Fri, 01 Aug 2014 01:15:15 GMT</pubDate>
      <guid>https://rip.trb.org/View/1318017</guid>
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