This talk draws from my research in green urban logistics in the past ten years or so. In this talk I will examine two major trends in last‐mile logistics in the US largely in response to the rapid growth in ecommerce: electrification and crowdsourcing/crowdshipping. I will focus my examinations on logistics efficiency in terms of cost, energy consumption, and emissions. At the end I will talk briefly about my view of the future of urban logistics.
Dr. Jane Lin is Professor of Department of Civil and Materials Engineering and holds a joint appointment with the Institute for Environmental Science and Policy (IESP) at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research has three focus areas: transportation emissions and air quality modeling and exposure, green
freight transportation and urban logistics, and computational transportation science. Lin has eighty refereed publications and over $4.72 million research funding as PI or co‐PI from various sources including the National Science Foundation (NSF), Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), and Transportation Research Board (TRB). Lin is Editor of Transport Policy, and Associate Editor of
Transportation Research Part D: Transportation and Environment. She also serves on the editorial boards of Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice and International Journal of Sustainable Transportation. Lin is currently the Vice Chair of the Section on Energy and Environment that oversees eight TRB committees. Prior to that, she served as Chair of TRB Committee on Transportation and Air Quality (ADC20) between 2011 and 2017. Lin received her MS and PhD degrees from University of California, Davis, and BS from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. She was a post‐doctoral fellow at the Harvard University Center for the Environment, Cambridge, MA before joining UIC.