Investigating the impacts of urban transport policies on essential freight operations

In 1984, Ogden described how “governments have involved themselves to varying degrees with different aspects of freight; some (such as rail) are traditionally controlled quite closely, while others (in particular, urban freight) have usually been relatively neglected.” In light of this, Ogden (1984) concluded that urban freight, given its importance in the economy deserves greater attention from transport planners and policy makers. The findings discussed in this paper are intended to demonstrate that the situation Ogden described in 1984 has changed little over the past twenty-seven years, with local authorities still having little knowledge or understanding about the issues faced by urban logistics operators, resulting in policy makers being unable to plan effectively to tackle the key issues. Section 2 of the paper reviews a selection of research from the UK and the USA that has attempted to identify and address the problems surrounding urban freight. It is clear that this continues to be a relatively under researched area despite its importance, therefore in order to address these shortcomings, this paper reports on qualitative research conducted to gain an understanding of the various stakeholder perspectives. The methods that have been adopted for this study are outlined in Section 3; and in Section 4, three main findings including the importance of urban freight; the main problems associated with urban freight operations; and a review of the initiatives that are in place to assist urban freight operations are all discussed from the perspectives of both local authorities and freight operators. The paper concludes in Section 5 with an overview of the key points.