Suggested Citation:
Holguín-Veras, José, Stacey D. Hodge, Jeffrey Wojtowicz, Caesar Singh, Cara Wang, Miguel Jaller, Felipe Aros-Vera, Kaan Ozbay, Andrew Weeks, M. Replogle, Charles Ukegbu, Jeff Ban, Matthew Brom, Shama Campbell, Iván Sánchez-Díaz, Carlos González-Calderón, Alain Kornhauser, Mark Simon, Susan McSherry, Asheque Rahman, Trilce Encarnación, Xia Yang, Diana Ramirez-Ríos, Lokesh Kalahashti, Johanna Amaya, Michael Silas, Brandon Allen, Brenda Cruz (2018) The New York City Off-Hour Delivery Program: A Business and Community-Friendly Sustainability Program. INFORMS Journal on Applied Analytics 48 (1), 1 - 91

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 words: Off-hour delivery, off-peak delivery, freight demand management, urban freight, freight emissions, freight sustainability