Parcel force

Moving stuff around cities is becoming an even more intractable problem than moving people. While personal travel plummeted during the pandemic, urban traffic remained remarkably constant as deliveries took up the slack. Even in pre-pandemic times, Transport for London predicted that the city’s light commercial traffic would increase by 22 per cent between 2011 and 2031, and this was before the flourishing of digital infrastructure that enabled takeaways and one-hour deliveries at the swipe of a screen.

The key issue now is reducing the impact of all that at-home retail therapy. And the uptake of kinder, smarter commercial vehicles. The next few years will see several pure electric delivery vehicles come to the market. While the most familiar