CITY FREIGHT - Inter- and Intra- Urban Freight Distribution Networks
Overview
Background & policy context:
Road freight transport has increased dramatically in the past decades within the urban conglomeration and the negative aspects of this growth are most visible in all European urban areas: road congestion, noise and pollutants emissions and accidents are problems that decrease the quality of the urban environment. Currently, many cities are imposing limitations for delivery of shopping centers by heavy vehicles and initiatives for urban freight distribution were undertaken. Although most of the developments mentioned above have started only recently, some first results seem very counterintuitive: instead of reducing congestion, some Urban Distribution Centres generate more freight vehicle movements than before.
Within the CITY FREIGHT project, the socio-economic and environmental impacts of changes in freight transport and door-to-door delivery in a variety of European conurbations will be analysed in a systematic and innovative way.
Objectives:
The objectives of the CITY FREIGHT project are the following:
- to identify and analyse working of innovative logistic schemes in seven countries as well as the urban policies which could support their implementation in order to promote a more sustainable development;
- to set up a list of criteria and a common assessment method for evaluating the schemes and the related accompanying policies (legal framework, land use planning, pricing);
- to analyse their internal technical and economical efficiency;
- to design, for one city or one urban region in each country, one or more schemes implementation scenarios and related accompanying policies;
- to assess and optimise the scenarios according to the urban sustainable development criteria;
- to present guidelines for implementing integrated strategies that could be recommended as 'Best Practices';
- to disseminate and exploit the Best Practice Guidelines through collaboration with the Local Authorities for the design of concrete implementation plans of integrated strategies.
Methodology:
The project will carry out an analysis of selected supply chains, already functioning in Europe, and an evaluation of their impacts on the urban environment using a common assessment methodology.
A number of indicators have been developed to select the most promising initiatives and each initiative has provided a set of characteristics, so that the conditions (city size, logistic level, etc.) under which it successfully could be applied have been listed. A methodology, focusing on contacts with local stakeholders, to construct the different scenarios implementing the specific initiatives has been defined as well as a number of common assumptions and parameters to be used in the project.
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