Tis’ the season for online shopping. Black Friday kicks off holiday shopping in earnest, filling our social media feeds with exhortations to shop online and skip the lines. Consumers have listened. A habit accelerated by pandemic-era shutdowns and calcified by convenience, online orders are expected to grow to a third of U.S. retail sales by 2027.  But the ease of online delivery comes with real trade-offs for dense urban environments like New York: more packages means more trucks, congestion and smog.  The Partnership for New York City estimates that we lose approximately $20 billion per year in lost time and productivity sitting in traffic. The litany of impacts is long.  Here in New York, we’re expected to accommodate a 43% increase of freight by 2045 — 430 million tons up from 300 million. With 90% of it coming in by truck, it’s easy to see how this growth could become unsustainable for our roads and bridges, our air quality, and even truck drivers themselves — most of whom are paid by the delivery and lose money sitting in traffic.  This is why New York City is taking a nation-leading approach to digging ourselves out from underneath our freight, creating a landscape ready for creative solutions by, and collaboration with, the private sector.  We don’t expect this modal shift to happen by sheer force of civic obligation — it needs to make financial sense. With congestion pricing weeks away, and a series of investments by New York City well underway, the environment is increasingly conducive to the change.  First, we’re putting our waterfront back to work — creating a “blue highway” network that shifts deliveries from road to water. New York City’s waterways have always been a source of our economic prowess. From our founding as a Dutch trading settlement until the 1950s, our waterfronts were centers for manufacturing and the movements of goods.  As cargo activities shifted mid-century, years of disinvestment followed. But our waterfront remains as important as ever: over the past 30 years we’ve reclaimed them for living and leisure. Now we must get back to our roots.  Today, the city and our partners in the federal government are investing more than $200 million to modernize and electrify the Brooklyn Marine Terminal — reimagining the 122-acre site as a key node in our blue highway network. From Hunts Point to Lower Manhattan we’re working to better accommodate freight arrivals on our piers and reimagining how our waterfront assets can be used in the future, including adding capacity to our Downtown Manhattan Heliport and passenger ferry landings so they can double as maritime and last-mile hubs.  Getting freight into the city is only the first half of the equation. The last mile can be the most congested, inefficient, and expensive for the trucking industry, particularly in our central business districts. Over the last five years, the city has grown its largest-in-the-nation cargo bike program. Two cargo bikes can replace one box truck, offering a safer, emissions-free solution — and take up less space.  A denser delivery system is more efficient, helping us chip away at the rapid growth we expect.  The city’s locker delivery program, LockerNYC, is another novel solution, helping consolidate personal deliveries to central locations. Its primary benefit is reducing truck stops in residential communities, but it has another: security. No more packages pilfered from your front door.  In an urban environment, our curb space is one of our true shared resources. A free-for-all of delivery, double parking, and commuting leads to inefficiencies, which we simply can’t afford in a higher-volume landscape.  The city will soon deploy a new “microhub” pilot to provide freight operators dedicated space along the curb and under our highways to transfer packages from trucks to low-emission vehicles — taking a bite out of double parking and saving a headache for all road users.  The city Department of Transportation is finalizing its rules to launch 20 sites over the next year, which would offset more than 600 truck trips per week, replacing them with smaller and more efficient vehicles.  This is just the beginning. This holiday season, the city is setting the table and inviting the private sector to come to the party, by making it appealing for them to do.  It is our New Year’s wish that the spirit of collaboration, faster delivery times along with the increasing economic sense of these changes will mean that in 2025, Black Friday is supported at last by our Blue Highway. Joshi is New York City’s deputy mayor for operations. Kimball is president & CEO of the New York City Economic Development Corp.