Applying a Mesoscopic Transport Model to Analyse the Effects of Urban Freight Regulatory Measures on Transport Emissions—An Assessment

Jacek Oskarbski,Daniel Kaszubowski

doi:10.3390/su10072515

Abstract

Sustainable urban freight management is a growing challenge for local authorities due to social pressures and increasingly more stringent environmental protection requirements. Freight and its adverse impacts, which include emissions and noise, considerably influence the urban environment. This calls for a reliable assessment of what can be done to improve urban freight and meet stakeholders’ requirements. While changes in a transport system can be simulated using models, urban freight models are quite rare compared to the tools available for analysing private and public transport. Therefore, this article looks at ways to extend Gdynia’s existing mesoscopic transport model by adding data from delivery surveys and examines the city’s capacity for reducing CO2 emissions through the designation of dedicated delivery places. The results suggest that extending the existing model by including freight-specific data can be justified when basic regulatory measures are to be used to improve freight transport. There are, however, serious limitations when an exact representation of the urban supply chain structure is needed, an element which is required for modelling advanced measures.

Highlights

Sustainable urban freight management is a serious challenge for decision-makers due to the increasingly more stringent environmental protection requirements
The source data were used to feed a mesoscopic transport model for the City of Gdynia developed within the CIVITAS DYN@MO project and to evaluate how the expected reduction in the inconvenience caused by freight vehicles stopping on the road can have a positive effect on traffic conditions in the analysed streets and on the related reduction in CO2 emissions
The model covers all of Gdynia which is divided into 173 transport zones

Summary

Introduction

Sustainable urban freight management is a serious challenge for decision-makers due to the increasingly more stringent environmental protection requirements. It involves being able to select the right solutions to reduce the adverse impact of freight activity on the environment and, most of all, to having a reliable quantitative evaluation of the results of the applied measures. This requires an analysis of how urban supply chains operate as a separate component of a city’s transport system and the ability to verify their impact on this system in accordance with the adopted criteria. These complexities are visible in the relationships between the city and the transport sector, often expressed in, for example, new environmental standards introduced for freight vehicles

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Conclusion