68 Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board, No. 2238, Transportation Research Board of the National Academies, Washington, D.C., 2011, pp. 68–76. DOI: 10.3141/2238-09 ally change delivery times is limited because it necessitates the concurrence of the receivers (who tend to prefer regular-hour deliveries to take advantage of the staff at hand), and (b) cordon tolls are not likely to be effective in inducing a switch to the off- hours because most segments of the urban freight industry cannot pass toll costs on to their customers, depriving them of the price signal needed to effect a change. The data from the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey indicate that (a) only about 9% of carriers would be able to pass the toll costs on to their customers and (b) when carriers were asked about why they did not change behavior in response to time-of-day tolls, about 70% of them cited customer requirements as the reason (1). In essence, the receiver is the key decision maker. Further analyses (2) concluded that the difficulties that carriers have in passing cordon time-of-day tolls to their customers reflect a highly competitive market with delivery rates equal to marginal costs. Because the cordon toll is a fixed cost (does not depend on the unit of output), it does not enter into the rates. The empirical data confirmed that only the market segments with market power (i.e., carriers of stone–concrete, wood–lumber, food, electronics, and beverages) could pass toll costs on in a meaningful way (2). The key insight is that, because the price signal only reaches the receivers in those cases where the carrier has market power (although in a diluted fashion because the toll costs are allocated among multiple receivers in the tour) and receivers have no incentive to change behavior, carrier-centered pricing policies are not as effective as they need to be. It follows that new policy paradigms are needed to specifically target the receivers to induce them to switch to the off- hours. The effectiveness of these policies has been established by previous behavioral research (3, 4). The fundamental tenet of this paper is that the key to inducing a shift of truck traffic to the off-hours is to convince receivers to accept off-hour deliveries (OHDs) by either providing incentives in exchange for their commitment to OHD or by fostering the use of concepts such as unassisted OHDs that do not require receivers to provide staff to handle deliveries during the off-hours. Because car- riers stand to benefit from doing off-hours work, they would be glad to do OHDs as long as a sufficient number of receivers are willing to accept OHDs (5). Such deliveries are 20% to 30% cheaper than regular-hour deliveries and lead to much-reduced parking fines, which average $500 to $1,000 per truck per month for regular-hour work in New York City. Inducing receivers to accept OHDs would (a) remove the barrier that prevents many carriers from doing OHDs, Overall Impacts of Off-Hour Delivery Programs in New York City Metropolitan Area José Holguín-Veras, Kaan Ozbay, Alain Kornhauser, Matthew A. Brom, Shrisan Iyer, Wilfredo F. Yushimito, Satish Ukkusuri, Brandon Allen, and Michael A. Silas This paper examines the chief findings of research conducted on policies to foster off-hour deliveries (OHDs) in the New York City metropolitan area. The goal was to estimate the overall impacts of eventual full imple- mentation of an OHD program. As part of the research, a system of incen- tives was designed for the receivers of deliveries the system combined Global Positioning System (GPS) remote sensing monitoring with GPS- enabled smart phones to induce a shift of deliveries to the off-hours from 7:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. The concept was pilot tested in Manhattan by 33 companies that switched delivery operations to the off-hours for a period of 1 month. At the in-depth interviews conducted after the test, the participants reported being very satisfied with the experience. As an alter- native to road pricing schemes that target freight carriers, this was the first real-life trial of the use of financial incentives to delivery receivers. The analyses indicate that the economic benefits of a full implementation of the OHD program are in the range of $147 to $193 million per year, cor- responding to savings on travel time and environmental pollution for regular-hour traffic as well as productivity increases for the freight indus- try. The pilot test also highlighted the great potential of unassisted OHD— that is, OHD made without personnel from the receiving establishment present—because almost all participants who used this modality decided to continue receiving OHD even after the financial incentive ended. The research conducted on the urban delivery industry’s response to freight road pricing (1) produced findings that challenged long-held assumptions. It showed that (a) the ability of carriers to unilater- J. Holguín-Veras, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Center for Infrastructure, Transportation, and the Environment, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 Eighth Street, 4030 Jonsson Engineering Center, Troy, NY 12180-3590. K. Ozbay, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Rutgers University, 623 Bowser Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854. A. Kornhauser, Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering, Princeton University, 229 Sherrerd Hall (ORFE Building), Princeton, NJ 08544. M. A. Brom, 4033 Jonsson Engineering Center, and W. F. Yushimito, 5107 Jonsson Engineering Center, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, 110 Eighth Street, Troy, NY 12180-3590. S. Iyer, Rutgers Intelligent Transportation Systems Laboratory, Rutgers University, CoRE 736, 96 Frelinghuysen Road, Piscataway, NJ 08854. S. Ukkusuri, School of Civil Engineering, Purdue University, 550 Stadium Mall Drive, West Lafayette, IN 47907-2051. B. Allen, KLD Associates, Inc., 43 Corporate Drive, Hauppauge, NY 11788. M. A. Silas, CENTRA Technology, 4825 Mark Center Drive, Alexandria, VA 22311.