Seamless Urban Freight Transport: The need for a new policy approach (Part 1)

During the past 15 years there have been many initiatives in the field of urban goods movement. It is also evident that policy-makers have increasingly recognised the importance of urban freight. These initiatives and policy developments have taken place in many countries and regions. In Europe research and policy development has been stimulated by EU research programmes and there have been important developments around the world and examples of initiatives can be identified in all continents.

Urban goods movement involves many actors (transport operators, retailers and service companies) this makes it a complex field and one in which it is difficult to achieve seamless transport. There are many points at which the logistics chain is subject to disruption of one type or another. Although there have been encouraging signs in policy development there remain many difficult areas – too often policies are directed at a single part of the chain often leading to unintended consequences – for example restrictions on vehicle size or time of operation may result in freight activity becoming a bigger contributor to congestion.

It is also clear that in many cities, policy formulation is separately directed at people movement and freight movement – there is a lack of integration and in that sense the policy formulation is not seamless.

In view of the above SIG 9 (Urban Goods Movement) and SIG 10 (Urban Transport Policy) will convene a Joint Workshop to be held in conjunction with the International Transport Forum event in Leipzig in May 2012.

Chair:

• Prof Steve Ison (Loughborough University)

Speakers:

• Prof Eiichi Taniguchi (Kyoto University)
• Prof Jose Holguin-Veras (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York)
• Prof Rosario Macario (Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon)
• Dr Laetitia Dablanc (IFSTTAR and METRANS visiting scholar, University of Southern California)
• Prof Ralph Elbert (Darmstadt University of Technology)

Organiser:

• Prof Michael Browne (University of Westminster)