Overview
For quite a long time it has been assumed that there is a “grey area” between passenger and goods traffic, which has not been currently recorded by the statistics and also has been assigned partially wrong. It concerns traffic with vehicles with which both goods and passenger transport can be executed (in particular combination vehicles, vans), and with those vehicles that are classified as delivery vehicles, but are used primary for services (e.g. handcraft) instead of commercial goods transport. It was needed to provide a research in this field.
The aims of the research undertaken were to improve the data basis in the areas “service transport” and goods transport with passenger cars, to create a basis for the consideration of service transport and goods transport with passenger cars in transportation demand models, and to deduce recommendations for regional surveys regarding service transport as well as goods transport with passenger cars.
Funding
Results
The executed pilot survey enables a basic estimation in transport figures of service transports as well as goods or material transports beside commercial goods transport.
The survey supplies data bases regarding the segment service transports for an extension of the passenger traffic model of the Canton of Zurich. Passenger cars of private owners (with prevailing “neutral” appearance) are used to a considerable extent for commercial trips. Therefore in traffic counts these trips cannot easily be assigned so to the group “service transports”. Inversely, passenger cars of legal entities are also used in a considerable proportion for private trips. For a detailed analysis of the usage of such vehicles, a scrutinised questioning is necessary. In order to receive a high response in future questionings with the same objective, further simplifications in the questionnaires should be made. This is due to the complexity of the matter, recognised in the implemented pilot.
In almost a quarter of the trips with goods or material transport in passenger cars, the weight of the transported things is below five kilograms. It can be assumed that for these trips – at least related to the criterion “weight of the transported goods” – there is no strong reason for the usage of a car. This concerns 9% of all trips with passenger cars. Within the group “service transport”, the potential for a modal shift from trips with cars or delivery vans to other transport means is mainly in the field of business trips. 40% of these trips carry goods of material, whereof approx. 20% are goods with a weight below 5 kg. In the fields of other business activities such as service, handcraft or bui