Cities, E-Commerce & Public Health: 3 Legal Pathways to Limiting Freight Vehicle Emissions

Amy E. Turner, June 2024

Read the report Cities, E-Commerce & Public Health: 3 Legal Pathways to Limiting Freight Vehicle Emissions in Columbia Law School's Scholarship Archive.

In recent years, cities have become increasingly defined by e-commerce – the sprawling network of goods delivery from central warehouses to neighborhood distribution centers to residents’ front doors. This growing network of warehouses and the freight vehicles that serve them contribute significantly to a community’s greenhouse gas emissions and exposure to harmful pollutants like nitrogen oxides (NOx), carbon monoxide and particulate matter. Moreover, so-called last-mile delivery warehouses (or distribution centers) are proliferating, largely in low-income communities and communities of color, where residents are exposed to increasing traffic, pollution, and harmful health impacts.

While a handful of cities have pursued approaches to lessening tailpipe emissions from freight vehicles, such as through electric vehicle and cargo bike pilot programs, there is a clear gap in regulating the emissions attributable to e-commerce warehouses and the vehicles that enter and exit them. In part, cities have had difficulty limiting freight vehicle emissions because federal law preempts certain state and local vehicle restrictions. Three policy approaches are discussed herein: (1) rules for drayage trucks within California’s Advanced Clean Fleets rule; (2) site-based emissions standards for warehouses (also known as indirect source rules); and (3) zero-emissions delivery zones in which zero-emissions vehicles (ZEVs) have priority access to loading and unloading areas. Each of these presents legal complexity, but elements of them can be available to cities looking to control emissions associated with e-commerce delivery.

Despite the relatively recent nature of e-commerce proliferation, last-mile delivery warehouses perpetuate longstanding patterns of environmental injustice, exposing low-income communities and communities of color to significant and harmful truck pollution. And though the federal law landscape can be murky, federal laws such as the Clean Air Act, the Energy Policy & Conservation Act and the Federal Aviation Administration Authorization Act allow some room for local governments to place limits or otherwise address pollution and other e-commerce impacts. The legal tools available to address their impacts are necessarily evolving, and they offer significant promise, particularly for jurisdictions willing to calibrate an approach carefully to applicable legal frameworks and to their local context.

Disciplines

Environmental Law | Law | Transportation Law

Recommended Citation

Amy E. Turner, Cities, E-Commerce & Public Health; 3 Legal Pathways to Limiting Freight Vehicle Emissions, Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, June 2024.
Available at: https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/sabin_climate_change/228