Freight transportation issues and needs often have a particularly significant impact in urban areas where manufacturing, distribution, or commercial retail-related freight generators are located. These areas centralise important freight transportation destinations, due to their high volume of freight products used and consumed. The high volumes of freight transportation activity in those areas and the necessity to better understand needs and impacts of urban freight movements generate and develop the research on urban freight transportation.

The METRANS Transportation Center in southern California, one of the leading centers for urban freight transportation research, arranges, with the support of the VREF, an every-other year international conference that focus on presenting research in the urban freight transportation field: the International Urban Freight Conference (I-NUF)

The FHWA's webinar featured three presentations given at the I-NUF 2017 particularly focused on challenges with urban freight transportation, delivery challenges and city planning for goods' movements.

• "Industry Impacts of Urban Area Freight Access" - Paul Bingham, EDR Group
• "Urban Freight Initiatives: State of the Art and State of the Practice" - Johanna Amaya Leal, Iowa State University
• "The Final 50 Feet of the Urban Goods Delivery System" - Anne Goodchild, University of Washington

Read more about I-NUF