In this paper, we present the challenges, failures and successes on urban freight transportation. We first identify the various involved stakeholders with their interests. Then we evaluate a large number of urban freight transport initiatives and identify lessons learned, which are distinguished in policy, logistics and technology based views. Further, we present a vision for urban freight transportation, which is not only based on the lessons learned, but also on actual market research reports and recent findings.
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Cities’ sustainability strategies seem to aim at the reduction of the negative impacts of urban freight transport. In the past decades, many public and private initiatives have struggled to gain broad stakeholder support and thus remain viable. Researchers and practitioners have only recently recognised stakeholder acceptance of urban freight solutions as a challenge. A first step in achieving convergence is to understand stakeholder needs, preferences and viewpoints. This paper proposes and applies an approach to identify the main stakeholder perspectives in the domain of urban freight transport. We use Q-methodology, which originates from social sciences and psychology, to record subjective positions and identify the dominant ones. We explain the approach, operationalise the method for the domain of urban freight transport and apply it to stakeholder groups in the Netherlands. We find four dominant perspectives, reflecting how stakeholders normally take positions in the urban freight dialogue. Important findings concern disparities between industry associations and some of their membership, divergent views about the expected role of public administration, and the observation that the behaviour of shippers and Logistics Service Providers (LSP) appears to be inconsistent with their beliefs. All these factors together can act as a barrier to the implementation of urban freight consolidation concepts. The Q-methodology is valuable for eliciting perspectives in urban freight and is a promising tool to facilitate stakeholder dialogue and, eventually, convergence.
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The transition from diesel-driven urban freight transport towards more electric urban freight transport turns out to be challenging in practice. A major concern for transport operators is how to find a reliable charging strategy for a larger electric vehicle fleet that provides flexibility based on different daily mission profiles within that fleet, while also minimizing costs. This contribution assesses the trade-off between a large battery pack and opportunity charging with regard to costs and operational constraints. Based on a case study with 39 electric freight vehicles that have been used by a parcel delivery company and a courier company in daily operations for over a year, various scenarios have been analyzed by means of a TCO analysis. Although a large battery allows for more flexibility in planning, opportunity charging can provide a feasible alternative, especially in the case of varying mission profiles. Additional personnel costs during opportunity charging can be avoided as much as possible by a well-integrated charging strategy, which can be realized by a reservation system that minimizes the risk of occupied charging stations and a dense network of charging stations.
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Urban freight transport is frequently censured for its unsustainable impacts. Although our current urbanized civilization requires an efficient freight transport system in order to sustain it, the common perception is that urban freight transport has negative impacts on all sustainability issues: social, economic and environmental (also known as the triple P: people, profi t and planet). Urban freight transport, or urban goods movement, is identifi ed as having the following unsustainable eff ects on: people, such as the consequences of traffi c accidents, noise nuisance, visual intrusion, smell, vibration and the consequences of (local) emissions, such as NOx and PM10, on public health; profit, such as inefficiencies (especially for carriers) due to regulations and restrictions, congestion and reduced city accessibility; the planet, such as the contribution of transport to global pollutant emissions (CO2) and the consequences for global warming.
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Authorities aim at making the urban freight system more sustainable. The most common instruments to do so are regulation or stimulation of good practices, by offering subsidies or initiating projects together with the private parties that are responsible for actually performing urban freight transport operations. This contribution examines the possibilities for (local) authorities to use their market role, i.e. being a big procurer of goods and services in a city that result in many urban freight transport trips, to stimulate more sustainable urban freight transportation. Procurement is usually not linked to transport and data from procured goods and services do not provide sufficient insights to estimates the impacts of deliveries and trips related to the procured goods and services. This contribution discusses two cases in which (local) authorities try to make the urban freight transport that results from their procurement activities visible, via different methods, such as delivery service plans, and spend analyses. The cases of Rotterdam (in the project BuyZET) and for the logistics hub in The Hague show the first results of how (local) authorities can act to improve urban freight transport once the trips caused by procured goods and services are clearly mapped. © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
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The paper discusses the growing importance of urban freight research given the increasing urban population trends. The complexity of urban freight systems means that it is essential for the public and private sectors to work together - one way to achieve this has been through freight partnerships. A short review of freight partnerships highlights the way in which they have fostered mutual understanding among urban freight stakeholders. The literature on shared situational awareness (SSA) and joint knowledge production (JKP) has been adapted to position freight partnerships and to further develop and link these partnerships to the concept of a living laboratory concerned with urban freight transport. This novel application of the living lab concept is introduced. Next, the first phases of a city logistics living lab brought in practice in Rotterdam are shortly mentioned. The living lab concept fits the complexities of the urban freight system well and has been a cornerstone of a recently started major freight project in the EU (CITYLAB). © 2016 Published by Elsevier B.V.
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City logistics is one of the causes of today's road congestion in our cities, but at the same time its efficiency is affected by the traffic problems. The driving behaviour and mission strategies used by vans and lorries operating in urban areas usually does not exploit modern infomobility solutions. CityLog, a project co-funded by the European Commission within the 7th Framework Programme, aims at increasing the sustainability and the efficiency of urban goods deliveries through an adaptive and integrated mission management and by innovative vehicle features. More particularly, CityLog integrates a wide range of logistics-oriented infomobility services that include an optimized pre-trip planner, a new type of navigation system based on enhanced maps and a last mile parcel tracking service to avoid unsuccessful deliveries. © 2011 IEEE.
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This paper examines the feasibility of using electric powered vehicles in urban freight transport from a carrier's perspective, including their attitudes towards electric freight vehicles (EFVs) and all relevant elements affecting this business case, such as: technological features, existing restricting and promoting policies, financial and non-financial incentives, type of operations, urban settings and logistics organization. We look at the business cases for different truck sizes, varying from small vans to large trucks, in relation to the logistics requirements. This contribution combines the relevant urban freight transport solution directions: technology (both for the vehicle and the supporting IT), logistics and policy. The attitudes of the different EFVs user groups are also taken into account. Only if all these elements support each other, a feasible case can be possible at this moment. We look at the current business case and make conclusions on where it is necessary to act in the near future in order to increase an uptake of electric freight vehicles. For this analysis we use the data collected from current demonstrations that are actually running in the European FP7 project FREVUE, which includes over 100 electric-powered vehicles in the cities of Amsterdam, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Milan, Oslo, Rotterdam, and Stockholm. This data includes operational, attitudinal and financial data for the before situation in which conventional vehicles were used and for the first year(s) where electric vehicles were operated. © 2016 The Authors.
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The number of light commercial vehicles (LCV) in cities is growing, which puts increasing pressure on the livability of cities. Freight vehicles are large contributors to polluting air and CO2 emissions and generate problems in terms of safety, noise and loss of public space. Small electric freight vehicles and cargo bikes can offer a solution, as they take less space, can maneuver easily and do not emit local pollution. There is an increasing interest in these vehicle, called light electric freight vehicles (LEFV’s), among logistic service providers in European cities. However, various technical and operational challenges impede large scale implementation. Within the two-year LEVV-LOGIC project, (2016-2018) the use of LEFV’s for city logistics is explored. The project combines expertise on logistics, vehicle design, charging infrastructure and business modelling to find the optimal concept in which LEFV’s can be a financial competitive alternative for conventional freight vehicles. This contribution to EVS30 will present the project’s first year results, showing the guideline for and the applied design of LEFV for future urban city logistics.
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Innovative logistics service providers are currently looking for possibilities to introduce electric vehicles for goods distribution. As electrical vehicles still suffer from a limited operation range, the logistical process faces important challenges. In this research we advise on the composition of the electrical vehicle fleet and on the configuration of the service network, to achieve a successful implementation of electric vehicles in the innercity of Amsterdam. Additional question in our research is whether the CO2 emission reduces at all or might even increase due to an increase of tripkilometres as a consequence of mileage constraints by the batteries. The aim of the implementation of the research is to determine the ideal fleet to transport a known demand of cargo, located at a central depot, to a known set of recipients using vehicles of varying types. The problem can be classified as a Fleet Size and Mix Vehicle Routing Problem (FSMVRP). In addition to the regular constraints that apply to the regular FSMVRP, in our case also time windows apply to the cargo that needs to be transported (FSMVRPTW). The operation range of the vehicles is constrained by the battery capacity. We suggest modifications to existing formulations of the FSMVRPTW to make it suitable for the application on cases with electrical vehicles. We apply the model to create an optimal fleet configuration and the service routes. In our research case of the Cargohopper in Amsterdam, the performance of alternative fleet compositions is determined for a variety of scenarios, to assess their robustness. The main uncertainties addressed in the scenarios are the cargo composition, the operation range of the vehicles and their operation speed. Based on our research findings in Amsterdam we conclude that the current generation of electric vehicles as a part of urban consolidation concept have the ability to perform urban freight transport efficiently (19% reduction in vehicle kilometres) and meanwhile have the capability to improve air quality and reduce CO2-emissions by 90%, and reduce noise nuisance in the inner cities of our (future) towns.
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