To date a considerable amount of the research regarding goods transportation by road has focused on the long-distance haulage sector, focusing largely on driver fatigue.

This research effort opens a relatively new field of interest by looking at another strand of the transportation business, the local/short haul Urban Multi-Drop Delivery (UMDD), whose specific characteristics distinguish it from the long-haul operation and result in different implications.

The overall aim of the research is to systematically assess the key factors that impact the safe and efficient transport of goods in the greater Dublin area.

Urban multi-drop delivery (UMDD) comprises a complex network of interacting systems - suppliers, distributors, customers and the regulators - that has the following characteristics: 

• Distribution provides an interface between product supply and the retail organisation. The logic of the distribution system is set to a large extent outside the distribution process itself, for example through the just-in-time systems and the power relationships it entails. 
• Important parameters such as safety fall between different imperfectly co-ordinated systems (product safety, occupational safety, traffic safety, public liability).

For these reasons, safety in this increasingly important nexus of transport activity has not been either very extensively or coherently addressed. While there has been quite a substantial amount of research in the long-haul transportation area which has highlighted key safety concerns for this sector of the industry much less systematic research has been conducted in the urban multi-drop operation. It also appears that in relation to public awareness as well as current transport policies the primary focus has been on the long-haul transport sector as opposed to the UMDD sector. To our knowledge this is the first study of its kind in Ireland.