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Increasing nationwide disparities in road freight emissions across cities

Nature Cities volume 3, pages 28–37 (2026)Cite this article

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Abstract

Globalized production and the expansion of e-commerce have intensified urban road freight demand, exacerbating environmental impacts of cities and potential equity concerns across cities. These challenges have hindered progress toward Sustainable Development Goals 3, 10 and 11, yet long-term spatial trends remain understudied. Here we analyze city-level freight-related emissions (PM10, PM2.5, CO2 and NOx) across 3,107 US counties from 2011 to 2020, identifying two key sources of emissions inequity: demand-oriented and socioeconomic status-oriented. Demand-oriented inequity indicates that cities near freight corridors or terminals face disproportionately high emissions relative to their freight demand, with discrepancies increasing by 5.6–14.2%. SES-oriented inequity shows that minority communities, particularly those located near freight networks, are spatially correlated with higher emissions and greater declines in household income. These findings highlight the deep-rooted spatial disparities in the urban freight system, calling for coordinated action at national, regional and city levels to embed environmental justice into transport planning and compensation strategies.

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Fig. 1: Spatial relationship between road freight emissions intensities and national freight infrastructure layout in 2020.
Fig. 2: Differences in road freight emissions intensities and evolution of MPI at national and urban (MSA) scales.
Fig. 3: The EKC fitting road freight emissions (CO2, NOx, PM2.5 and PM10) versus income levels along freight corridors and noncorridor cities.

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Data availability

The dataset utilized in this study are publicly available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17396631 (ref. 54).

Code availability

The experiment was performed using PyCharm Community Edition 2023.1.1, the OLS regression model was conducted in Stata 16 (64-bit) and the cartographic work was completed with ArcGIS Pro. The code for calculating Moran’s I index, bivariate Moran’s I index and OLS regression experiment is available via GitHub at https://github.com/TJ-Yu/U.S.-cities-road-freight-emissions/.

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Acknowledgements

This study is supported by the China Association for Science and Technology Youth Talent Support Program for PhD Students (to C. Yu), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 52172305 to C. Yang and grant no. 52302394 to Q.Y.), the Shanghai Municipality Science and Technology Commission (grant no. 24692106600 to Q.Y.) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (grant no. 22120230311 to C. Yang).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Urban Mobility Institute, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

    Chengcheng Yu, Quan Yuan, Haocheng Lin, Yeke Zou & Chao Yang

  2. Key Laboratory of Road and Traffic Engineering, Ministry of Education at Tongji University, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

    Chengcheng Yu, Quan Yuan, Wentao Dong, Haocheng Lin, Yeke Zou, Chao Yang & Zhengtao Qin

  3. Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Washington, Seattle, WA, USA

    Anne Goodchild, Travis Fried & Zhengtao Qin

  4. Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Yougeng Lu

  5. Department of Urban Planning and Spatial Analysis, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Qianyao Duan

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Contributions

C. Yu contributed to the conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis and writing of the original draft. C. Yang contributed to the critical review and editing of the paper. Q.Y. contributed to the supervision and editing of the paper. W.D. contributed to data curation, programming and technical support. A.G. contributed to the revision. T.F. contributed to the literature review and paper revision. H.L. contributed to data curation and visualization. Y.Z. contributed to programming. Y.L. contributed to resource provision and validation. Q.D. contributed to the visualization. Z.Q. contributed to the paper revision.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Quan Yuan or Chao Yang.

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Nature Cities thanks Alena Brettmo, Nicolas Brusselaers and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Tables 1–6 and Fig. 1 present statistical analyses, model estimations and additional results supporting the main findings.

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Yu, C., Yuan, Q., Goodchild, A. et al. Increasing nationwide disparities in road freight emissions across cities. Nat Cities 3, 28–37 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s44284-025-00368-x

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