Micropantries ā€” commonly called ā€œlittle free pantriesā€Ā  ā€” and community fridges are a frequent sight throughout Seattle and the greater Puget Sound region. One estimate suggests that they supply around 4 million pounds of food per year to neighbors in need in the Seattle area, more than the stateā€™s largest food bank. The curbside cupboards are a decentralized, community-driven effort to fight food insecurity and reduce food waste at the neighborhood level, but their ad hoc nature limits their dependability ā€” users donā€™t know when food is available without repeatedly checking, and donors donā€™t know what foods are needed most.

Now, anyone who interacts with micropantries or community fridges in the Seattle area can try out an experimental app, made by 91±¬ĮĻ researchers, that brings a suite of new features to the micropantry network. , maps many local pantries across the region. The app also gives each pantry an activity feed where users can share food theyā€™ve donated, report on stock levels, add requests to a wish list, post photos and leave other notes. The research team also retrofitted some pantries with sensors that anonymously auto-report their usage and stock levels to the app in real time.

ā€œThis is an effort to document and quantify the phenomenon of micropantries,ā€ said , a senior research scientist at the 91±¬ĮĻ . ā€œLots of micropantries and community fridges popped up around the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I was curious about who uses them and how they are used.ā€

The team was cognizant of privacy concerns and designed the smart pantry tech accordingly.

ā€œPutting cameras in the pantries could give us a lot of information about what specific foods are moving through the system, but that may also deter users who are concerned about privacy,ā€ said , a 91±¬ĮĻ doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering who designed and built the sensor suite. ā€œInstead, we settled on simpler sensors that measure weight and interactions like opening the door to measure stock levels while preserving everyoneā€™s anonymity.ā€

The researchers hope that neighbors will find new ways to connect and help one another through these tools. A user might see that stock levels are low in a nearby pantry, for example, and decide to add some food. Another user might request certain foods to accommodate their dietary restrictions.Ā 

The sensor-equipped pantries are a small subset of the dozens of pantries throughout Seattle, but in addition to providing some neighborhoods with enhanced food tracking, they will generate aggregate data that will help Dalla Chiaraā€™s team study donor and usage behavior. Dalla Chiara also plans to survey donors to learn more about what motivates people to provide food to pantries.

ā€œWe know that there is a lot of food insecurity in Seattle and in the United States in general,ā€ Dalla Chiara said. ā€œBut we know that there is also a lot of food waste ā€” lots of people have a surplus of food. And we want to see how grassroots efforts like micropantries can address both food insecurity and waste at the same time.ā€

Dalla Chiara and his team recently completed a refit on a cold, sleeting March day at a pantry owned by Saint Paulā€™s Episcopal Church near Seattle Center. The church keeps the pantry regularly stocked, and rector Stephen Crippen is curious about the data the new system will produce.

ā€œIt puts numbers on what weā€™re actually accomplishing,ā€ Crippen said. ā€œIt helps us get in touch with whatā€™s going on on this street.ā€

The research team is also working with local businesses and nonprofits to encourage and track food distribution throughout the pantry network. In April, Seattle-based recycling startup ran a nonperishable food drive across Seattle and delivered 25,000 pounds of food to the ; from there, volunteers from the Cascade Bicycle Clubā€™s distributed the food to micropantries around the city by bike, giving the network an infusion of both food and usage data. The and the nonprofit helped support the projectā€™s community fridges effort.

Dalla Chiara recognizes that there are other grassroots online, and he doesnā€™t want his app to replace those services. Nor does he expect the smart pantry network to remain in service indefinitely ā€” it costs about $150 to retrofit each pantry with sensors, and all that tech will be difficult to maintain after the study concludes in October of this year. At its core, the project is an effort to learn about micropantry usage and explore how technology might encourage sharing of resources and mutual aid systems.

ā€œWeā€™re trying to measure and quantify goodwill,ā€ Dalla Chiara said. ā€œBehind each little free pantry there is a whole system of behaviors ā€” people trying to help one another. If we can understand that system better, we can support it better.ā€

Other 91±¬ĮĻ collaborators include , professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Urban Freight Lab; , assistant teaching professor of environmental and occupational health sciences; , assistant professor of food systems, nutrition and health; and , assistant professor in the Allen School.

For more information, contact Dalla Chiara at giacomod@uw.edu.

While it is common to see Amazon Prime vans circling the city of Seattle year-round, there might be even more deliveries than usual right now, thanks to the Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals that rang in the holiday season.

Researchers at the 91±¬ĮĻ were curious how the delivery of e-commerce products affects pollution levels across the Seattle metropolitan area, which includes Tacoma, Seattle, Bellevue and Everett.

According to the team’s study, neighborhoods within 3 kilometers (1.9 miles) of an Amazon last-mile delivery station or sortation center are exposed to twice the amount of delivery van and truck traffic than neighborhoods farther away. These neighborhoods are home to a higher proportion of low-income households and people of color compared to the rest of the metro area. These residents also order 14% fewer packages than average in this area.

The researchers Dec. 2 in Research in Transportation Economics.

“E-commerce is changing how we shop and how we travel in cities, but transportation researchers don’t really have a good way to measure or even talk about e-commerce in terms of equity,” said lead author , a 91±¬ĮĻ doctoral student in the civil and environmental engineering department. “So, we started by asking, ‘Well, who’s ordering the packages?’ which I think we have a clearer idea of now. Then we asked, ‘Who’s affected by the pollution and the traffic that this ordering creates?’ Our study found that there’s a substantial disparity between those two populations.”

Because this is the first study of its kind, the researchers started by looking for broad trends based on household income and race. “People of color” in this study included people who identified as any other race or ethnicity besides non-Hispanic white on the census. The team defined a ‘vulnerable’ neighborhood as one with a below-average household income and a higher percentage of people of color compared to the broader metropolitan area.

To get an idea of who was ordering packages, the researchers used data from the , which, in a recent survey, included a question about how many packages people were ordering on an average day.

From there, the team looked at where the neighborhoods were situated compared to Amazon last-mile delivery stations.

“Last-mile delivery stations are a unique feature to the Amazon supply chain,” Fried said. “They have trucks going in, usually from a sortation or a fulfillment center that’s a little bit further out from the city. Then coming out the other end are cargo vans ā€” these are the cargo vans that we see circulating our neighborhoods. Ultimately, we tried to estimate this inflow of trucks and outflow of cargo vans.”

The researchers chose to focus on Amazon because it is the biggest player in the e-commerce market. Any trend they found for Amazon would likely be similar for other e-commerce companies, the researchers said.

Based on a neighborhood’s proximity to a last-mile delivery station and the residential ordering behaviors, the researchers could model how cargo vans and trucks were distributed throughout the network. Then they used the to simulate the amount of pollution each neighborhood would experience.

“It’s almost like each warehouse represents a sun with rays emanating out of it,” Fried said. “Those rays will be more intense the closer you are, and then as it branches out to other neighborhoods, it becomes less dense. The closer you are to something that’s hot, the more heat you will end up feeling. And these warehouses are just massive generators of freight activity. But not all that is destined for those neighborhoods nearby. And that’s where the inequity lies.”

In some ways these results are not surprising, the researchers said.

“Warehousing and distribution centers have historically concentrated in historically marginalized communities, including those with a high number of low-income households and a high proportion of people of color,” Fried said. “The concentration of industrial zoning happened through mechanisms that were either explicitly racialized during the early-to-mid 20th century or had the indirect effect of creating segregation near industrial land. Even though these policies are illegal today, we still see evidence of them locked into our modern-day development.”

The researchers hope to expand this finding in future studies by looking at how these results specifically affect different racial and ethnic groups as well as other vulnerable groups, such as older adults and people with disabilities. The team is also planning to make the model more easily accessible for other cities to use.

As for what the average consumer can do now, the answer is not straightforward.

“You could say, ‘OK, just stop shopping online.’ But then people may just be driving more to shop and there will be more cars on the road, which still leads to more air pollution,” Fried said. “There’s no easy solution to this issue. But if we’re trying to improve something, we need to at least know where we start.”

Additional co-authors on this paper are , 91±¬ĮĻ doctoral student in the industrial and systems engineering department, and , 91±¬ĮĻ professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the .

For more information, contact Fried at tfried3@uw.edu.

In Amazonā€™s hometown, people turn to their computers to order everything from groceries to last-minute birthday presents to the odd toothbrush or medication forgotten from the store.

If online shopping continues to grow at its current rate, there may be twice as many trucks delivering packages in Seattleā€™s city center within five years, a new report projects ā€” and double the number of trucks looking for a parking space.

In the , the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) and the 91±¬ĮĻā€™s at the have analyzed solutions for alleviating urban congestion by making truck parking spaces more productive and reducing the growth of truck traffic.

ā€œSeattle is the perfect laboratory to find better ways of managing commercial truck parking and delivering packages in urban settings,ā€ said , SCTL director and a 91±¬ĮĻ professor of civil and environmental engineering. ā€œBy testing data-driven solutions on our streets and in our buildings, we hope to reduce traffic in congested areas of the city as well as missed deliveries that frustrate consumers and retailers alike.ā€

By mapping privately owned delivery infrastructure for the first time, a team of 91±¬ĮĻ researchers and students found that 87 percent of all the buildings in downtown Seattle, Uptown (also known as lower Queen Anne) and South Lake Union have to rely on the cityā€™s curb and alley space to receive deliveries. Only 13 percent of buildings have loading bays or docks that allow trucks to park on private property.

Thatā€™s why the report focuses on whatā€™s known as the ā€œFinal 50 Feetā€ problem: the last and surprisingly complicated leg of an urban delivery that begins when a driver must find a place to park a truck or vehicle ā€” usually on a public street or alleyway ā€” and ends when the customer takes receipt of their package.

Itā€™s part of a broader research initiative spearheaded the by SCTLā€™s , which is partnering with SDOT, Nordstrom, UPS, the U.S. Postal Service and Charlieā€™s Produce to re-think everything from how cities apportion curb and street space to how building owners manage the growing avalanche of packages delivered to urban towers.

ā€œSeattle is one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, and SDOT is committed to meeting the urban goods delivery challenges facing most big cities in the U.S.,” said Christopher Eaves, project manager at SDOT. ā€œWe know that issuing parking tickets to companies who are simply trying to meet the daily delivery needs of residents and businesses isnā€™t the right solution. So, our goal is to identify and implement scalable strategies that improve deliveries at existing buildings, as well as initiate strategic research to mine new data.ā€

The 91±¬ĮĻ research team found that reducing the number of failed delivery attempts as well as the amount of time a delivery truck is parked in a loading space could offer significant public and private benefits. 91±¬ĮĻ researchers and SDOT plan to test promising improvement strategies in and on the streets around theĀ  this spring.

ā€œThese two actions alone could reduce congestion and free up curb space for cars, buses, bicycles and other people who need to use that shared public space,ā€ said Barbara Ivanov, director of the Urban Freight Lab. ā€œThose efficiencies have the added benefit of saving retailers and delivery services money, and getting orders into the hands of customers faster.ā€

Cutting down on failed first delivery attempts has the potential to greatly reduce truck trips in Seattle, cut business costs and ensure that tenants in multifamily buildings can shop online and get their orders when they expect them, the report finds.

By tracking real-world deliveries in a downtown office building ā€” the Seattle Municipal Tower ā€” a hotel, a residential building, a historic building and the retail mall at Westlake Center, the 91±¬ĮĻ researchers discovered delivery drivers encounter logistical barriers that consume a significant portion of their time. Clearing security in urban towers took 12 percent of the total time, and looking for tenants and riding freight elevators took 61 percent of the total time.

The report estimates that 73 percent of delivery time is spent in buildings and, as a result, the Urban Freight Lab will pilot test a smart locker system in the loading bay of the Seattle Municipal Tower. This could substantially reduce delivery time, failed first deliveries and the amount of time that delivery trucks occupy parking spaces that serve the building.

The smart locker system pilot will allow drivers from multiple delivery companies to securely leave packages in the vestibule of the 62-story Municipal Tower. Then, the locker system will notify enrolled tenants of deliveries by text or email and send a lock code, allowing them to pick up the packages at their convenience rather than having to stop working and intercept a delivery person in their office.

The Final 50 Feet project is the first time that SDOT, in partnership with the Urban Freight Lab, has analyzed both the street network and the cityā€™s vertical space such as office, hotel, retail and residential towers as one unified goods delivery system.

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For more information, contact Goodchild at annegood@uw.edu and Ivanov at ivanovb@uw.edu.