NEW YORK—Package deliveries in New York City are booming, bolstered by the pandemic and online shopping, with 80 percent of households in New York City receiving a package a week, according to the Office of the Mayor.
Almost 90 percent of goods are transported into or around the city by trucks, which emit fine particulate matter, also known as PM2.5, and nitrogen oxides, which can help form PM2.5. Many of them are older, heavy-duty diesel vehicles, which contribute a substantial amount of PM2.5 pollution in urban areas.
Fine particulate matter is among the most harmful pollutants, with health impacts like childhood asthma, cancer, cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, and premature mortality. According to city data, long-term exposure to the pollutant contributes to an estimated 2,000 excess deaths a year, or 1 in 25 deaths, in the city.
Around 14 percent of PM2.5 pollution in the city comes from traffic, and this pollution is far from evenly distributed. The poorest neighborhoods often suffer the most in this equation—the PM2.5 levels from traffic are often higher in high-poverty neighborhoods, as well as the number of hospitalizations related to this pollutant.
To facilitate the explosion of e-commerce, more and more facilities called last-mile warehouses are going up in neighborhoods already overburdened by air pollution from traffic. These facilities take in goods from trucks coming in from across the country and sort them before they are transported to their final destination, which is usually not too far—often the “last mile” on their journey.
Today, these warehouses can be constructed without the need for a permit or environmental review in eight commercial or manufacturing districts. As a result, they are clustered in neighborhoods around Newtown Creek, a small canal that separates Queens and Brooklyn, as well as Sunset Park and Red Hook in Brooklyn and Hunts Point in the Bronx.
These neighborhoods are, or encompass, environmental justice areas—places that have experienced a disproportionate amount of negative impacts from environmental issues due to historical disinvestment and social inequities. The clustering of these facilities, and the subsequent increase in truck traffic, only increases the air pollution burden.
But a City Council bill, a zoning amendment, and other new city initiatives may finally start to address this issue. Ultimately, however, the electrification of medium and heavy-duty trucks may be the only way to markedly reduce the air pollution levels from traffic in these areas. The city, and the country as a whole, is far from achieving that goal.
“Antiquated Zoning Regulations”
In Sunset Park and Red Hook, neighborhoods in the Western part of Brooklyn close to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a major highway, there are at least six last-mile facilities, according to the Last Mile Coalition—an advocacy group that brings together multiple community organizations fighting for better regulation of these warehouses.
“At these intersections along Third Avenue—which is a really, really dangerous avenue in Sunset Park—you have an increase in truck traffic,” said Nebraska Hernandez, the climate justice hub advocate at UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latino advocacy group. “These trucks are coming in and out of the industrial waterfront where the facilities are located, and it’s endangering the pedestrians.”
Because these facilities often include concrete structures and large parking lots for trucks, they can also increase the urban heat island effect—where highly urbanized areas experience higher temperatures—according to Willis Elkins, the executive director of the Newtown Creek Alliance.
The delivery of goods to businesses and homes is complicated in a city like New York, which has so little empty space. Not only are city residents ordering more online than ever before, but local businesses rarely have storage spaces, which means they receive deliveries multiple times a week to keep up with sales.
In May 2024, the deputy mayor for housing, economic development and workforce Maria Torres-Springer, made a commitment to regulate last-mile warehouses by requiring a special permit through the City Planning Commission.
“It can get at the clustering of these facilities due to antiquated zoning regulations,” said Kevin Garcia, the senior transportation planner at the Environmental Justice Alliance. “[Communities] only find out about these facilities once they’re up and operating, once they see this increase in truck traffic.”
Garcia’s organization is also a member of the Last Mile Coalition, which drafted its own zoning amendment in 2022. It included a request for buffer zones around schools, parks, public housing developments and other last-mile warehouses. Currently, some of these facilities are located in Red Hook, near the largest public housing development in Brooklyn.
“These trucks are coming in and out of the industrial waterfront where the facilities are located, and it’s endangering the pedestrians.”
— Nebraska Hernandez, climate justice hub advocate at UPROSE
City government seeks to regulate not only the siting of new last-mile facilities, but also the indirect pollution coming from present and future warehouses. If City Council Bill 1130—which was introduced in December by Council Member Alexa Alvilés, who represents parts of Sunset Park and Red Hook—passes, then these facilities and the trucks that come and go from them would be required to make efforts to reduce their emissions.
“The number of trucks that are coming to and from that facility would have to be accounted for, and then the warehouse operator would have to work with the city… to come up with an emissions reduction plan,” said Garcia, who supports the bill. “What we want is for these companies, these warehouse operators, to be good neighbors.”
The bill could also require warehouse operators to regulate the times and methods of their deliveries—encouraging the use of already-established pollution mitigation measures like night delivery or smaller electric vans for deliveries from the facility to people’s homes.
A similar bill, dubbed the “Clean Deliveries Act,” is also working through the state legislature. But these bills are received with some skepticism by trucking companies, according to the Trucking Association of New York.
“One thing that we are concerned with is warehouses, or distribution centers in general, leaving the state and going across the border to border states,” said Zach Miller, the vice president for government affairs for the trucking association. “This would make it actually less likely to have electric trucks coming and making those deliveries because they’re farther out, and they would be put in places that don’t have electric vehicle mandates.”
Miller asserts that his organization is not fundamentally against the bill, but wants to ensure that warehouse operators and trucking companies have a wide variety of legally recognized options when it comes to pollution-mitigation efforts. If those efforts are limited to electric vehicle usage, he says, it could have consequences for the state.
“You’re putting the New York-based companies at a competitive disadvantage, because there is no mandate for, for example, a truck driver coming from Indiana to service a warehouse in New York City,” said Miller. “If it’s battery electric or nothing for a truck like that, the answer is going to be nothing.”
Truck Electrification—a Live Issue in New York
Though these bills offer a potential for more community input in the siting of last-mile facilities, and for pollution mitigation for trucking to these warehouses, the electrification of heavy-duty vehicles is needed to truly reduce the air pollution from trucks that burdens many New York City communities.
New York has been leading the charge on incentives for this switch with policies like the Truck Voucher Incentive Program, which offers financial help for trucking businesses looking to transition to zero-emission vehicles, and the city’s Clean Trucks Program, which offers incentives for replacing the oldest and most polluting diesel trucks with less polluting, hybrid, or electric vehicles.
Pre-2007 diesel trucks are the most polluting, and harmful to people’s health because they were sold prior to the Environmental Protection Agency’s more stringent rules on emissions, which required diesel particulate filters.
Evolving EPA guidance has reduced emissions from trucks to the point that, if a business replaces a pre-2010 model year truck with a contemporary one, they can reduce negative health impacts by up to 96 percent.
Despite this, a 2022 study found that even new diesel trucks can emit high levels of nitrogen oxides while on the road, particularly while driving at low speeds. When driving below 25 miles per hour, trucks with model years between 2010 and 2015 produce nitrogen oxides emissions at five times the regulatory limit.
“There’s a gap between the test cycles that EPA requires in order to certify the vehicle versus real-world driving,” said Michelle Meyer, a researcher at the International Council on Clean Transportation, who co-authored the study. “The EPA regulations require the trucks to meet certain emission standards. … But this only covers a narrow band of driving conditions, and specifically excludes most low-speed urban driving conditions.”
According to the study, heavy-duty diesel trucks, the ones carrying the heaviest loads, make up only 6 percent of vehicles on the road in New York City, but make up 52 percent of on-road vehicle tailpipe PM2.5 emissions. Efforts to electrify this type of vehicle have so far had limited success.
“We still don’t have the charging or grid infrastructure that we need to see to really ramp up electrification,” said Miller.
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Donate NowThe 2021 Advanced Clean Trucks Rule, which went into effect this year, requires large truck manufacturers to sell an increasing number of zero-emission vehicles in New York, using a system of credits.
Though implementation of the policy could have a positive impact on communities like the ones in Brooklyn, large electric trucks continue to be at least double the cost of diesel trucks and the charging infrastructure for these vehicles is not spread out across the state, making it difficult for manufacturers and trucking companies to adopt.
“Though battery electric is showing some real promise in urban last mile,” said Miller, “the [last-mile] warehouses are served by vehicles from all over the country, and those tend to be larger over-the-road vehicles for which electrification is not really viable at this point.”
Small electric vans could potentially be adopted for delivery from warehouses to people’s homes, said Miller, but even that possibility seems far off. Today, many state lawmakers agree, with people on both sides of the aisle calling for delays to the implementation of the policy—a disappointing outcome for communities in environmental justice areas.
“We don’t agree with the flags and concerns that [the trucking industry] is raising,” said Garcia. “The industry is being given four and a half years to start manufacturing cleaner trucks. It’s a slow and phased-in approach that the rule allows for, and there are also credits that are allowed for these truck manufacturers to comply in the early years of the standards.”
Boats, Bikes and New Boundaries
Besides the electrification of large truck fleets, the city has also been working to address the air pollution through other programs—though many are still in their infancy.
Blue Highways, a tentative city initiative to increase the amount of goods that are moved throughout the city through local waterways, has gained steam in the past couple of years. Though it might provide relief for some communities, it could simply shift the burden to others that are close to ports. The city’s Department of Transportation is still in the planning phase.
The Commercial Cargo Bicycle Pilot Program and the MicroHub program make use of smaller, non-polluting vehicles to deliver goods to their final destinations. The latter would set up smaller distribution hubs in neighborhoods across the city where larger trucks could pass on packages to delivery workers using anything from a handcart to an electric van.
“It is long past time to have this network be redesigned.”
— Zach Miller with the Trucking Association of New York
The city’s truck routes, which were established in the 1970s, delineate the roads these vehicles can take when driving through the city. In an effort to rethink how freight moves through the city, the Department of Transportation is in the process of redesigning this network—an undertaking that is popular among local communities and the trucking industry.
“We’re really excited about it,” said Miller. “I think 80 percent of deliveries are happening to people’s homes right now in New York City, and that’s not what the truck route network was designed to do, so it is long past time to have this network be redesigned.”
New Yorkers are online shopping more than ever before. A report released during the pandemic-fueled e-commerce boom predicted that goods moving through the city would increase by 68 percent by 2045, implying that the issue of how to move things into and around the city will endure.
All the while, small communities that border industrial zones peppered across Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx will continue to pay the price through their health, and the programs that could offer them relief are still in their infancy.
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Lauren Dalban is a New York City-based reporter with a background in local journalism. A former ICN fellow, she now covers environmental issues in all five boroughs. Originally from London, she earned a B.A. in History and English from the University of Virginia, and an M.S. from Columbia Graduate School of Journalism.
