Future Blog | What Will Urban Logistics Be Like in the Future?

Project Manager Matias Oikari from Forum Virium Helsinki’s Smart Mobility team explores the fascinating world of urban logistics in this blog post.

Rapid Transformation

I’m a child of the 1990s. Back then, mail order catalogs and TV-Shop were part of everyday life, and hardly anyone ordered anything online yet. The internet was new and wondrous then, and its adoption made it harder to make calls on landlines. Now, as I write this blog, it’s easy to see how much has changed in both our consumption habits and how goods are moved. E-commerce is now an established way to acquire services and products, and purchased goods arrive via new methods, especially those becoming common in cities.

For several years now, we’ve read in the media about the tremendous growth of e-commerce, which has led to quieter shopping streets and local stores filling up with pickup lockers. Today’s city dwellers weekly see autonomously moving robots in the streetspace, and a friendly neighbor even told about a drone which delivered lunch to Vuosaari during a garden party.

This isn’t a sci-fi movie; it’s today. Urban logistics is undergoing a period of transformation.

The Growth of E-commerce

The growth of e-commerce has been a long-term trend in Finland. The COVID-19 years marked the peak of this growth, and after a few quieter years, e-commerce has returned to its growth trajectory, with no end in sight.

Even though Finns might feel that parcel pickup points are everywhere, Finland still lags globally in e-commerce purchases. The US e-commerce giant Amazon has, through years of development, optimized its e-commerce logistics to perfection, allowing an order placed in the afternoon often to arrive at a US customer’s doorstep on the same day. A friend of mine living in China was amazed when, on a train journey from Shanghai to Nanjing, food delivery couriers from various services boarded the train from station platforms, bringing prepared meals to customers who had ordered from their seats on the train.

While e-commerce growth has been slower in Finland than in some other parts of the world, it’s not necessarily a bad thing. Finnish consumers get to benefit from the lessons learned elsewhere, as operating models have been tested in the wider world and arrive in Finland as ready-made services. Although Finland is steadily catching up to other countries in the bigger picture, we aren’t behind in everything.

“Mom, what’s that?” – Delivery Robots in the Street Space

More and more Finnish city dwellers have spotted a cute, small delivery robot diligently toiling away on their evening walk, waving a little orange flag. In turn, city residents have helped the robots over the worst snowdrifts, so diligence seems to be reciprocal.

Unlike many countries with significantly larger e-commerce markets than Finland, delivery robots are already commonplace here. Estonian Starship has R&D operations in the Helsinki metropolitan area in addition to their Alepa robots (in cooperation with S-market). Wolt has also piloted delivery robots in the Helsinki metropolitan area. In addition to the determinedly moving delivery robots in the streetscape, numerous experiments utilizing logistics drones have been conducted in Finland, most recently by Wolt in cooperation with the drone company Manna.

Delivery robots have proven to be functional solutions even in winter, which shows the technology is already viable. This isn’t just about showcasing technology though; delivery robots have a genuine mission, familiar from the wider world: to satisfy our need to get e-commerce purchases delivered as quickly as possible.

However, new technology and good taste in music (Alepa robots sometimes play music!) alone aren’t enough to guide us effortlessly into the future of urban logistics. We still need to answer the questions we hear from the skeptical passerby wondering about a delivery robot: what happens when there are thousands of these?

Autonomous Logistics Robots on Land and in the Air

For the past five years, I’ve worked at Forum Virium Helsinki, closely with our project partners, on several projects which have developed and researched autonomous delivery robot services (LMAD, New Solutions in City Logistics, URBANE, DISCO). Through these projects, we’ve aimed to determine potential applications for autonomous robots in urban spaces and how they suit dense urban structures.

Urban logistics is one of the clearest use cases for autonomous robots. Traficom, the City of Helsinki, and the police have viewed our robot pilots in Helsinki positively, which has helped us gain practical experience through innovation projects. From these projects, we’ve gathered valuable information on the suitability of delivery robots for the city, where one of the biggest challenges from an operational perspective is accessibility.

A real challenge in the future might be the growing number of delivery robots. Forum Virium Helsinki has examined the city’s role in solutions related to managing various drone fleets used for delivery – both land-based and airborne. So far, the solutions are under development, but Helsinki has taken a proactive approach, for example, regarding drones. Suitable applications for drones have been extensively studied in projects like AiRMOUR and CITYAM, in which Forum Virium Helsinki has been actively involved.

Autonomous last-mile logistics solutions are expected to become more common in the near future. This means a growing need to manage fleets of autonomous devices so that urban space doesn’t become an uncontrolled playground for them. We’re also seeking solutions to this challenge, for example, through the Chrous project starting this year, one of whose goals is to develop traffic management systems for autonomous robot fleets.

For flying drones, solutions are already being developed for U-space airspaces and drone traffic management. The first flight corridors and air traffic control have already been piloted. In addition to various technological solutions, restrictive measures can be used, as has been done with electric scooters. So, there are plenty of methods available, which means you can continue to greet a cute delivery robot without fear for the future.

Citizens at the Heart of Innovation Work

Bringing new services and technologies to the city isn’t an end in itself. In Forum Virium Helsinki’s urban logistics projects, I’ve always emphasized the perspective of city residents and everyday life, which is one of Forum Virium Helsinki’s core pillars. Our role in innovation projects is not only to enable experiments with autonomous devices, for example, but also to connect with residents and highlight their views. As a Master of Social Sciences, I find this particularly important, as the adoption of new technological solutions that affect the daily lives of city dwellers never happens in a vacuum.

As part of our resident collaboration, we’ve investigated Helsinki residents’ attitudes towards delivery robots and logistics drones through workshops, surveys, and events. A valuable part of our work is to identify what kind of city residents want to see in the future.

So, what have Helsinki residents thought? Regarding various delivery robots, residents have been mostly excited. Robots are seen as fun and cute novelties, and their potential as new services that make everyday life easier is recognized. Concerning flying logistics drones, residents have, however, emphasized that they don’t like the idea of swarms of drones carrying everyday consumer products. Therefore, in our projects, we’ve emphasized possible use cases in the social and healthcare sector, such as the transport of first aid supplies, which city residents view positively.

We will continue to approach the technologies and service concepts piloted in our innovation projects with healthy skepticism – let’s research and experiment first before drawing far-reaching conclusions.

Room for Everyone in a Smart City – Optimizing Street Space

Various delivery robots, drones, and smart parcel lockers are among the most visible new developments in urban logistics, alongside the electrification of traditional delivery vehicles. Development and new solutions are also being sought for the challenge of limited street space.

In an ever-growing city, the number of commuters and diverse needs increases, while the available street space in already built areas remains unchanged. This is a widely recognized challenge for which it’s often difficult to find simple solutions. Many have at some point been annoyed by a truck or car parked on a sidewalk or bike path. However, delivery drivers don’t do this intentionally, but due to limited street space; goods must be delivered, even if there are no loading and unloading zones nearby. This is because a city cannot allocate unlimited loading zones without reducing the mobility options for other street users – space reserved for a specific purpose always takes away from something else.

Existing loading zones can also become congested. At Forum Virium Helsinki, we’ve aimed to find solutions to these challenges based on the principle of resource wisdom: if we cannot add something, let’s use it smarter. As a project manager, I’m involved in the DISCO project, which develops urban logistics. In this project, real-time data was collected on the occupancy rates of loading zones and the types of vehicles parked there. The collected data is used to develop loading zones (one observation was the misuse of loading zones for passenger car parking), but we also wanted to test leveraging real-time information directly for drivers. Could visualizing the real-time availability of loading zones increase their utilization and reduce unnecessary driving?

The data we collected was visualized in Tietorahti’s map service, where professional drivers could see the real-time availability of loading zones (a red icon indicated occupied, green meant free). As part of the experiment, we surveyed drivers, and about half of the respondents found the visualization useful for route planning.

Solutions related to dynamic street space management are also interesting. These allow street space to be flexibly allocated for changing needs, for example, according to the time of day or season. Could we create flexible curbsides that serve urban logistics needs during delivery times but transform for other uses for the rest of the day? Dynamic and flexible solutions are needed if we want to optimize the use of our limited urban space and maximize the well-being of our city residents.

Smooth Urban Logistics is a Prerequisite for a Functional City

The future of urban logistics is no longer just a vision; its first waves are already shaping how cities operate. This blog post would be considerably longer if I had, for example, discussed the electrification of transport or urban logistics trends like the physical internet, which are already influencing logistics principles and contributing to the achievement of emission targets.

While the present offers promising solutions, such as autonomous delivery robots, it’s clear that the future will bring new, unexpected challenges. Simultaneously, innovations are maturing behind the scenes of logistics, subtly improving the logistical everyday life of cities. It’s evident that new solutions and services are needed.

There’s good reason to be optimistic about the future of urban logistics, but healthy skepticism should not be abandoned in the face of novelty. New urban logistics services or technological solutions should not continue to be developed in isolation from their operating environment – the city itself. Over the years, I’ve noticed that experiments conducted in a genuine urban environment serve as an excellent tool against the above mentioned isolation. Through experimentation, we receive direct feedback on the functionality of new solutions and how city residents perceive them. Forum Virium Helsinki will remain strongly involved in this work in the future.

Future blog entries:

• What will the urban nature of the future look like?
• What does the future of food production look like?
• What will the future of Urban Air Mobility be like?
• What will the future of Helsinki’s digital twins be like?
• What will the future of water transport look like in Helsinki?
• What does the future hold for electric cars?

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