28: Dispelling the e-Commerce and Urban Transport Environmental Doomsday forecasts: a counter intuitive Australian Case Study – The Postal Transport Network Restructure, 1995 to 2000

Since the McKinsey Company first forecast, in 1994, that home shopping via the internet, would change our lives forever, there has been a continual concern that this demand would generate both more Business to Business (B2B) road transport trips, and a quantum leap in the Business to Consumer (B2C), householder delivery trips. This was also additional to the growth expected in most major capital cities over the next fifteen to twenty years.

Although there is much discussion as to when the internet began to generate, or most likely substitute existing business into either smaller B2B pulses to customers, or beginning the household e-Commerce deliveries, by 1998 the internet was generally accepted as having had an impact.