Overview
Urban areas represent particular challenges for national and international freight transport, both in terms of logistical performance and environmental impacts. A more systematic and holistic approach is needed at the city level in order to improve the situation. Several European cities are now working on Sustainable Urban Logistic Plans (SULPs), bringing together local actors, improving planning, and initiating actions needed to improve performance and sustainability of urban logistics.
NORSULP will develop the SULP methodology in the Norwegian context, thus facilitate developing SULPs in Norwegian cities and regions.
Nine Norwegian municipalities/cities are actively involved in the project, including Oslo, Bergen, Trondheim, Stavanger, Kristiansand, Tromsø, Fredrikstad, Drammen and Bodø. In these cities, the project will support initiation of SULP processes.
The project will contribute to a more sustainable and efficient transport system where city logistic measures are viewed in conjunction with public and private transport plans. Enhanced efforts to optimise efficiency through better planning and management will be of significant value to both transport companies and their clients in both ends of the value chain.
SULPs will promote change towards sustainable urban logistics and significantly increase the likelihood of achieving ambitious emission cut targets in Norwegian cities. During the first meeting of participating cities, each city gave an introduction to the main urban logistics challenges in their local context, and expressed their interests and expectations to how NORSULP can be useful to them.
In the first part of the project it will be reviewed experiences with SULPs and urban freight planning in European cities. The review is a systematic review with the keywords mobility, freight, urban and plan (or words that are synonyms). Our findings suggest that initiatives/plans regarding urban logistics can be categorised into two groups depending on the content and the target group of the plan. One group contains more general guidelines focusing on methodology and guidelines for sustainable urban logistics planning. The other categorisation is actual existing sustainable urban logistics plans, which can be further categorised into three groups depending on their geographical and institutional level; the national level, regional level and local/city level.
The next task is to analyse the potential for transfer of experiences to other planning systems, Norwegian systems in particular. Another assignment is to identify alternative solutions for how a sustainable urban logistic plan may be incorporated in the already existing planning hierarchy. The structuring of existing literature achieved in this review might also provide an increased common understanding of the SULP concept, thus ensuring further developments to move in the same direction depending on local conditions.