Emission estimation of on-demand meal delivery services using a macroscopic simulation

While macroscopic simulations of passenger vehicle traffic within cities are now common practice, the integration of last mile delivery into a macroscopic simulation to evaluate the emissions has seldomly been achieved. In fact, studies focusing solely on last mile delivery generally focus on evaluating the delivery service itself. This ignores the effect the delivery service may have on the traffic flow in cities, and therefore, on the resulting emissions. This study fills this gap by presenting the results of two macroscopic traffic simulations of New York City (NYC) in PTV VISUM: (i) on-demand meal delivery services, where the emissions are evaluated for each OD-Pairs (i.e., each trip) and (ii) on-demand meal delivery services, where the emissions are evaluated for each link of the network (i.e., street). This study highlights the effect on-demand meal delivery has on the travelled distance (i.e., detours), congestion and emissions per km of every vehicle in the network, not just the delivery vehicles.