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City Questionnaire

Main findings and conclusions

The results of the city inquiry give a good overview on the current problems and issues to be dealt with concerning the movements of goods in urban areas and the situation in urban freight transport planning in city administrations. The following general conclusions can be drawn:

• Most of the asked European cities have problems concerning urban freight transport which affect the attractiveness and quality of life of the city. Main problems are related to suitable infrastructure for deliveries, city access, noise and pollution.
• For most of the cities the important issues concerning urban freight are dealing with co-operation among all local actors, coordinated urban freight policy, information, statistical data/data acquisition and use of innovative vehicle technology for city distribution.
• Not all of the cities are aware of the ongoing changes in logistics and city distribution (e.g. e-commerce, ITS) and know about new operational and technical possibilities (e.g. traffic management, enforcement support, etc.) to improve the situation.
• Compared the existing problems and issues to be dealt with in urban freight transport planning there is no or not enough manpower (compared to passenger transport) within the city administration who takes care about urban freight issues. Urban freight transport planning is neglected in many cities compared to passenger transport. More than half of the cities do not even deal with urban freight transport planning. The cities should provide more manpower to deal with urban freight transport planning.
• The asked cities are very interested in getting information about urban freight issues as e.g. co-operational issues, city distribution centers, e-commerce, modeling tools, PPP.
• In most of the cities there is a lack of statistics and data concerning urban freight transport. The data availability is poor compared to passenger transport. For urban freight transport planning data is a very important basis for evaluation of suitable measures. Especially permanent or periodic surveys are needed as well as more investment in data collection and statistics on urban freight transport.
• Half of the cities meet regularly transport actors. These contacts are crucial to solve the existing problems with solutions which have a high acceptance. Therefore the cities should intensify these activities.
• Only a few cities are using planning tools for urban freight transport issues. Especially the use of tools which are able to model distribution chains is low. For evaluation of measures and forecasts such models are efficient tools. The cities should be more informed about the available tools and possible applications referring to urban freight transport.

Overall it can be concluded that to reach a more sustainable urban goods transport joint activities by the cities and transport actors are needed.

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