Dr. Anne Goodchild

Director, UW Supply Chain Transportation and Logistics Center

Dr. Anne Goodchild leads the University of Washington's academic and research efforts in the area of supply chain, logistics, and freight transportation. She is Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and serves as Founding Director of both the Supply Chain Transportation & Logistics online Master's degree program and the Supply Chain Transportation & Logistics Center, the latter which launched the Urban Freight Lab (UFL) in 2016 to bring together the public and private sectors to address the challenges of the urban freight system by engaging in innovative research. Under Goodchild's leadership, the UFL coined the increasingly used term "Final 50 Feet" and defined it as the last leg of the supply chain for urban deliveries—including finding parking, moving items from a delivery vehicle, navigating traffic, sidewalks, intersections, bike lanes, and building security, and ending with the recipient. In addition to being key to customer satisfaction, this final segment is both the most expensive (where an estimated 25-50% of total supply chain costs are incurred) and most time-consuming part of the delivery process—and ripe for improvement. One of the hurdles in the final 50 feet is that many different parties are involved—city departments of transportation, delivery carriers, property owners, residents, and consumers—making a collaborative effort between sectors essential for developing mutually beneficial solutions.