ORNL Review: E-Commerce's Impacts on Transportation

E-Commerce's Impacts on Transportation

Imagine that you have a computerized home business that tracks truck routes and auctions off truck space to various companies that need help delivering their products all over the nation. You feel good about your business because it increases transportation efficiency. It puts on the road a larger number of fully loaded trucks and fewer half-empty ones. You also feel good because you do your banking online and download most of the books, videos, and music that you want from the Internet. That means you are not driving to your bank and several stores; instead you're saving fuel and reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other pollutants. Nevertheless, you are ordering groceries, clothes, and household items online, so you're partly responsible for the increase in delivery truck traffic in what used to be a quiet neighborhood.

Now, multiply yourself many times over and you can see why ORNL's Center for Transportation Analysis (CTA) and the Transportation Research Board co-sponsored a workshop on the "Impacts of the New Digital Economy on Transportation: Developing Research and Data Needs." As a result of the workshop held September 14 and 15, 2000, in Washington, D.C., Pat Hu, director of CTA, is developing a research agenda and identifying the data needed to allow accurate predictions of the effects of the digital economy on transportation with respect to planning, land use, safety, the environment, and energy use.

Mike Hilliard, Frank Southworth, Rekha Pillai, and David Middendorf, all of the CTA in ORNL's Energy Division, recently published a white paper entitled Potential Effects of the Digital Economy on Transportation, which was distributed at the workshop. They evaluated business-to-business, business-to-consumer, and consumer-to-consumer electronic commerce, as well as telecommuting.

"We tried to identify how e-commerce will change the demand for transportation," Hilliard says. "Because information can be transmitted electronically, it may be unnecessary in the future to ship as many books, videotapes, and music CDs by Federal Express, United Parcel Service, or the U.S. Post Office. Banking can be done online so people won't have to drive to the bank so often. So the effect of e-commerce could be a reduction in the driving of cars."

Because information, entertainment products, and money can be transmitted electronically and shopping can be done online, electronic commerce is expected to affect transportation needs. Photo collage by Gail Sweeden.

On the other hand, Hilliard notes, if an increasing number of people do online shopping and order groceries and other items from large discount stores online, there will be increased demand for deliveries by truck and increased truck traffic in residential neighborhoods, threatening the safety of pedestrians and pets. An increase in telecommuting could create its share of altered traffic patterns, as well. "If more people telecommute, they may move farther from their workplace in the city," Hilliard says. "But when they do commute to their business for occasional meetings, they will drive farther."

Transportation needs could be reduced if community work centers networked to multiple employers were established for telecommuters throughout the nation. "You drive a short distance to a center that has up-to-date computer equipment leased by your company," Hilliard says. "You do your work at the center for your company whose headquarters are far away."

Hilliard says that the digital economy could impact land use. "How will the digital economy change our cities 20 years from now?" he asks. "Will the large, multi-purpose shopping malls of today remain popular in 20 years, or will e-commerce make them as uncommon as they were only 40 years ago?"

Current planning to meet future transportation needs is complicated by our inability to predict the effects of e-commerce on those needs. According to ORNL's white paper: "With the competing forces at work in this system, it will be challenging to determine the net effect of the changes, particularly as the digital economy continues to grow at an exponential rate."

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