- [Narrator] E-commerce Services can bring
new jobs to communities,
but they can also impact traffic, congestion
and the environment in negative ways.
The Center for Transportation Research
and the Texas Department of Transportation
studied how residents can be affected
by looking at current
and projected consumer demands,
industry and workplace standards,
and zoning policies in these areas.
- With the pandemic,
and with kind of virtual participation
and technology having increased over the past few years,
everyone has a smartphone, everyone has a tablet,
and everyone is online shopping.
And so with that has been the rise of e-commerce.
When you think of e-commerce,
you think, "Oh, people are shopping less frequently.
"There'll be less people on the roads."
But there's also a kind of Catch-22
where you have more delivery drivers on the road
fulfilling those online orders
and more people driving to return their packages,
and more kind of the freight vehicles
coming into an area
where they need to supply a big bulk
of products for people to buy.
And so this project was really centered on
how well e-commerce affect the land use.
- What we saw was the need to understand the new patterns
that were being established by freight
and the business, the logistics itself.
This to us,
was a wonderful research to go in
and find out, get data to see
how it was developing.
- [Katie] Creating and developing a methodology
and geographical framework
to predict where as e-commerce booms
and different e-commerce companies
such as Target or Amazon
or UPS and FedEx need to increase their presence
in different areas.
Where are they gonna place their warehouses
and where are they gonna kind of disrupt the status quo
of current traffic, current land use,
where people are living?
- I can give you one example here in El Paso,
the appearance of Amazon.
All of a sudden,
I can tell you TxDOT didn't even know.
I think the only ones that knew were the county
where they were gonna acquire the right away
from the county and they showed up, right?
As a matter of fact,
they're like a block away from us
and we noticed we had just finished
the interchange here at I-10 in America
and they're like a block away.
And we right away noticed the changes.
And now we're having to go back,
and redefine and revise any improvements
that we have planned.
We need to keep gathering data
and information to help us create tools that
can help to be able to design
better infrastructure
and also make decisions or recommendations.
- This project will benefit Texas citizen
by making sure that they still reach their quality
of life in their deliveries and their products.
And now that they're relying on online shopping
and getting goods,
making sure that they get those goods
at the speediest time possible
because there are facilities nearby them.
- [Narrator] For more information
and to find the publication for this project,
please visit the TxDOT Research Library
at the link shown below.