Transportation planners in the U.S. are facing a new—and constantly shifting—freight reality. E-commerce and omnichannel retail have fundamentally destabilized traditional supply chain models, challenging decades of established transportation planning and infrastructure design. At the 2025 CTS Transportation Research Conference, Alison Conway, a freight expert and professor of civil engineering at the City College of New York, examined the e-commerce evolution’s profound transportation implications during the opening keynote address.
Watch a video of Conway’s keynote address
The first major trend Conway highlighted was the dual shift occurring in logistics. On one hand, the long-term trend of logistics sprawl—in which large warehousing facilities are moving further away from urban cores—continues. One example is Eastern Pennsylvania’s “East Coast Inland Empire” of warehousing facilities, which Conway’s research team has been studying. On the other hand, the countertrend of “proximity logistics” requires smaller distribution centers to move back into dense urban areas to meet on-demand, same-day delivery expectations. This movement is further complicated by the emergence of omnichannel retail—local stores doubling as distribution hubs—and informal micro-distribution, with parked delivery trucks temporarily serving as mobile warehouses.
“Now when we have on-demand deliveries, we’re not just talking about specific warehouses,” Conway said. “We have this whole network of other types of facilities that will fill those demands.”
Conflicts related to land use and community character are another planning challenge in the new freight reality. Traditional zoning is struggling to keep pace with facilities that blur functions, such as high-cube warehouse facilities and retail locations primarily used for fulfillment. According to Conway, these new facilities can “deactivate” urban streets and diminish community cohesiveness by replacing traditional ground-floor uses with large, block-sized warehouse walls. In rural and suburban areas, rapid warehouse development can lead to out-of-scale industrial buildings, subsequently changing community character and increasing traffic volumes.
On the flip side, Conway noted that distribution facilities can also benefit communities by providing more delivery options, jobs, and tax revenue. She also emphasized that this new complexity stems from consumer demand. “The reason all this change is happening is because we, as the people using online tools, are demanding it,” she said. “When we say we want our delivery tomorrow, it means we need distribution somewhere close to us.”
This new freight reality exposes significant gaps in transportation planning and infrastructure design. Data access is a major challenge: gaps in employment, warehouse, and vehicle data are key concerns. Traffic operations planning is difficult because of unknowns about the function of facilities, effects across jurisdictional boundaries, and the balance between community costs, such as noise and congestion, and worker access, such as public transit schedules. In addition, urban street design is affected by conflicts between freight vehicles and vulnerable road users (which include delivery drivers loading and unloading vehicles in or adjacent to street traffic), a wider variety of freight vehicles making deliveries, and demand patterns that don’t align with legacy parking facilities and curb regulations.
A final key question Conway posed was, Who is driving this rapid demand? Her research found that e-commerce is predominately driven by “super receivers”—typically, wealthy households or families with small children—in addition to low-income, car-dependent rural residents who lack access to physical stores.
For freight researchers, critical issues remain, including a need for better data, flexible zoning and curb regulations, methods for collaborative planning across small jurisdictions, and more understanding of risk tolerance and complex accessibility factors for online shopping and delivery tradeoffs.
CTS Director Kyle Shelton noted that Conway’s presentation fit well with CTS’s 2025 theme of "Unpacking Freight: From Producers to Front Doors"—a theme that has, he said, provided an opportunity “to not only explore what is involved in running a freight system, but also to ask some provocative questions … and explore some new ways to research and build on what our freight system of the future can look like.”
Following her keynote, Conway was joined by Leah Shaver, president and CEO of The National Transportation Institute, for a panel discussion moderated by former CTS Senior Fellow Robin Hutcheson (now chair of the Metropolitan Council). A primary discussion topic centered on how the transportation industry will need to adapt in response to the changes Conway described.
According to Shaver, the current freight workforce should be equipped with tools and training to create better synergy within its multi-generational workforce. “There are four generations operating at [freight] organizations … and they have an extraordinary challenge relating to each other, communicating with each other, collaborating on important projects, and coaching the current workforce to adapt to these changes.”
Conway emphasized considering driver health and safety when making decisions. “As freight planners, we tend to optimize our networks based on costs and travel distances and not on the risk or physical demands we are placing on our drivers,” she said. “For the urban street designer, the first piece of advice I would give is to think about the freight operator as a human being and recognize they are vulnerable when outside their vehicle.”
—Megan Tsai, contributing writer
