Delivery Model

Soundcast represents medium and heavy truck trips, which includes all types of freight from and between industrial, commercial, and residential land uses. In addition to this, there was interest in testing scenarios of increased online shopping, which would presumably replace some home shopping trips with delivery trips to homes.

To represent this in Soundcast, we created a new truck mode called "delivery," which borrows characteristics of medium trucks. The primary difference is the attraction rates, which are set to zero for all land use except residential. This means that delivery trips are produced from the same locations as other medium trucks (primarily from industrial locations, but all other to some degree) but are only attracted to residential zones.

The number of delivery trips is defined exogenously in emme_configuration.py: total_delivery_trips = 50000

Some considerations for this model:

• we are assuming the same trip lengths for these delivery trips
• the total number of delivery trips may need to be scaled to represent the fact that delivery trips to zones might make multiple deliveries there. In other words, if both my neighbor and I receive a package in the same day, there is a chance that package will be sent on the same truck. We need to identify reasonable factors for this to create a total delivery trip number that replaces an in-person shopping trip.
• some of these trips are not in medium-sized delivery trucks, but in personal vehicles (Amazon Flex)
• these trips may also include food and grocery delivery since productions do include retail and other land use types.