Behavioral Modeling of Urban Freight Transport

Freight transport is essential to modern urban civilization. No urban area could exist without a reliable freight transport system. Although the private sector is responsible for much of this system, the public sector has a vital role to play in the provision of infrastructure and the establishment of a social and legal framework within which transport can occur. For these reasons, goods movement deserves and is increasingly receiving, explicit consideration in urban transport policy and planning. Many cities around the world have conducted studies aimed at resolving urban goods movement problems and a considerable, if disparate, body of research results are available. This book brings together much of this knowledge and experience in a comprehensive source of information on urban freight, particularly from a public policy or planning viewpoint. It provides both a conceptual basis for urban goods movement analysis and detailed, practical guidelines which may be used directly by those responsible for urban freight policy and planning. The author has worked for over twenty years in this field and he draws upon his experience in Australia, the United States, Great Britain, Canada and The Philippines to produce a book which is international in scope and perspective. The book is written for practising professionals, such as engineers, economists and planners, working in local government, urban transport planning agencies, highway authorities, consultancies, or research institutes; it is also relevant to graduate courses in transport planning, traffic engineering or urban policy. It is of interest to all who have a concern for contemporary issues in urban development.

Decision makers in freight transportation need to assess new distribution systems and the impacts of changes in the freight distribution environment on infrastructure needs and usage, logistical performance, emissions, and energy use. There is a need, therefore, for behavioral models that can predict goods flows and vehicle flows in both current and future situations. This research outlines a conceptual framework consisting of the markets, actors, and supply chain elements of freight movement. Supply chains are constructed by linking distribution channels (of different logistics characteristics) between different activity types, such as consumers, supermarkets, stores, offices, distribution centers, and factories. The framework outlined in this research was used to develop the GoodTrip model—a demand-driven, commodity-based freight movement model that incorporates supply chains. Starting with consumer demand, the model estimates goods flows and simulates vehicle tours. The open architecture of the model allows mixed use of empirical data, behavioral models, and scenario-type assumptions. The behavioral models will be developed in future research. In its first application, the GoodTrip model was used to compare the logistical performance and external impacts of three types of urban distribution systems: the traditional system and two concepts using urban distribution centers (one using vans, the other using automated underground vehicles). The results show considerable differences in the performance and effects of the alternatives, especially when they are applied to different types of distribution channels, such as food retail stores or bookstores.

Impact of cycle rickshaw trolley (CRT) as non-motorised freight transport in Delhi

Transportation officials, metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), and companies of varying size can all benefit from freight movement data. Obtaining freight movement data and route choice information is crucial to planning, improving current and future transportation infrastructure, locating businesses, improving efforts to streamline goods movement, especially urban goods movement, and reducing energy usage within freight transportation. Obtaining data on freight movements can also help in better planning transportation infrastructure to improve safety. Also, with increasing demands and changing consumption habits, mobility being offered as a service, and with new technologies such as 3-D printing, the landscape of freight planning is changing, as businesses compete to meet the needs of a growing customer base, while transportation planners aim at meeting these needs by maintaining and updating the transportation infrastructure.For decades, transportation research has focused on passenger travel behavior. Much of this research has examined route decision choice and, more recently, trip chaining of personal vehicles, both individually and collectively. Discrete choice modeling has commonly been used to better understand passenger movement and predict route decisions based on geographic and demographic data from Census data and personal surveys, and micro-simulation has been used to model estimated movements through the transportation network. However, there is a growing interest in examining freight movements, and although previous research has been done to look at freight route choice regarding individual trips, there is increasing interest in freight tours. This paper is an overview of the current tour-based freight modeling methodology found in the literature. Background information on tour-based freight modeling is provided, as well as common modeling methods, data sources, and findings. Consideration is given to new technologies and safety considerations excluded from the current literature. Suggestions are provided for future tour-based freight modeling studies.

This paper provides an extensive review of surveys and data-collection programmes focused on urban goods movement (UGM). Surveys investigating passenger urban travel have a decades-long tradition. The same is not true for UGM. The first specific UGM surveys appeared about 10 years ago in response to the rapid growth of car traffic, congestion, pollution and lack of space. Most of the time, these surveys have been carried out to resolve specific, local problems concerning traffic. Only a few of them have taken a global approach to urban logistics by including all logistics operators (own-account and carriers), all delivery vehicles (heavy and light vehicles), all deliveries and pickups (from express to full payload) and an entire metropolitan area and surroundings. Due to various European programmes, an inventory has been created to analyse urban goods data collection according to spatial level and methodology of capture. With this inventory, European urban freight indicators can be described, along with the units in which they are measured and their purposes. The relevance of urban goods transport surveys lies in their capacity to give decision-makers an account of urban freight transport functioning, ratios and data, so as to help in formulating planning, regulation and forecasting. It appears that focusing on the movement (delivery/pick-up), as the unit of analysis in establishment-driver surveys is the most efficient approach to describe the generation of vehicular flow in the city. This fact is revealed in the French UGM surveys, which take into account the complexity of urban logistics.

Freight traffic fulfils not only the business needs of a region to move goods between producers, manufacturers, and end consumers, but also creates a host of unintended environmental, social, and economic impacts. Despite its importance, freight traffic impacts and associated logistic inefficiencies are largely overlooked in the urban transport discussions in developing economies like India. This paper addresses this research gap by outlining the research progress related to freight transport in India and discusses the key problems related to freight system performance. The published literature in the last three decades (1990–2020), policy briefs and institutional reports are explored to summarize key findings and uncover thematic linkages. We categorize the inefficiencies in the freight system into four aspects: (i) long-haul trucking, (ii) last-mile logistics, (iii) freight distribution (inventory level), and (iv) policies and regulations. Apart from identifying the limitations in policy discourse, this paper also explores the possible solution concepts to improve efficiency in freight transport and mitigate the unintended negative externalities in urban areas. The overall conclusion is that increasing and improving infrastructure and equipment, technology and operations, and policy and regulations will go some way towards making freight more efficient in India and reducing congestion and emissions of air pollutants and GHG. The present paper can be expected to promote further freight research and effective policy instrument design in India.

How is freight distribution affected by travel time unreliability?

Freight transport demand models are generally based on administrative commodity type segmentation which are usually not tailored to behavioral freight transport demand modelling. Recent literature has explored new approaches to segment freight transport demand, notably based on latent class analysis, with promising results. In particular, empirical evidence from road freight transport modelling in Germany hints at the importance of conditioning and handling constraints as a sound basis for segmentation. However, this literature is currently sparse and based on small samples. Before it can be accepted that conditioning should be integrated in the state-of-the-art doctrine of freight data collection and model specification, more evidence is required. The objective of this article is to contribute to the issue. Using detailed data on shipments transported in France, a model of choice of shipment size with latent classes is estimated. The choice of shipment size is modelled as a process of total logistic cost minimization. Latent class analysis leverages the wide range of variables available in the dataset, to provide five categories of shipments which are both contrasted, internally homogenous, and directly usable to update freight collection protocols. The groups are: "‘standard temperature-controlled food products"’, "‘special transports"’, "‘bulk cargo"’, "‘miscellaneous standard cargo in bags"’, "‘palletised standard cargo"’. This segmentation is highly consistent with the empirical evidence from Germany and also leads to better estimates of shipment size choices than administrative segmentation. As a conclusion, the finding that conditioning and handling information is essential to understanding and modelling freight transport can be regarded as more robust.

The present system for pick-up and delivery of small shipments by trucks within an urban area is not very efficient. This is often due, in part, to poor vehicle utilization, competition between freight and passenger movements using available common right-of-way, highly congested and dense city centres, and current business practices. The lack of coordination between truck shipment activities often leads to route duplication, street congestion, long waits at loading/unloading facilities, and underutilization of available truck capacity.Because provision of consolidation terminals appears to be one of the promising alternatives for alleviating some of the problems of the current freight distribution structure, this study has been undertaken to gain better insight into the feasibility and desirability of this alternative. For this purpose, the City of Calgary, which had a population of 500 000 in 1977, was chosen for identifying the economic benefits of applying the concept of consolidation terminals operation to the movement of small shipments within the city. The results revealed that a system with a single consolidation terminal located at an appropriate site is economically feasible and would significantly reduce the number of trucks and truck trips needed for urban goods movement.

Investment is an important determinant of aggregate economic performance in most macroeconomic models. There are, however, quite different hypotheses about the determinants of aggregate investment behavior. Several studies have evaluated the performance of alternative investment models based upon explanatory power and/or predictive ability.' A survey of the results of these studies reveals that, depending on the time period used for the evaluation, and the type of investment spending, the preferred models vary between studies. Unlike previous studies, we evaluate alternative econometric investment models utilizing hypothesis tests based on a structural norm. Because of differences in the theoretical foundations for the investment hypotheses, empirical specifications used for evaluating these hypotheses with available data are non-nested; i.e., the alternative specifications cannot be viewed as special cases of one another. Strictly speaking, the criterion of explanatory power is not correct when non-nested alternatives are being considered and the questions focus on comparative structural specifications. The choice of the most appropriate structure of econometric investment equations is important for two reasons. First, if one is interested in forecasting investment spending, a properly specified model will perform better over time than an improperly specified one. Confidence in model specification reduces the probability that the results are a statistical artifact or a result of spurious time series regressions [6, 202-204]. Second, if one is interested in evaluating the effects of policy changes on investment spending, model specification is crucial.2 Alternative specifications of investment equations have quite different implications for policy changes. For example, a change in the investment tax credit would have no direct impact in an accelerator model. This paper reports results from applying non-nested hypothesis tests to the evaluation of alternative investment models. The issue is which model specification is most appro-

Pickup and delivery operations are an essential part of urban goods movements. However, rapid urban growth, increasing demand, and higher customer expectations have amplified the challenges of urban freight movement. In recent years, the industry has emphasized improving last-mile operations with the intent of focusing on what has been described as the last leg of the supply chain. In this paper, it is suggested that solving urban freight challenges requires an even more granular scale than the last mile, that is, the last 800 ft. The necessary operations in the last 800 ft require integration of diverse stakeholders, public and private infrastructure, and a diverse set of infrastructure users with multiple, varied objectives. That complexity has led to a gap in the needs of delivery operations and the characteristics of receiving facilities (i.e., unloading and loading facilities and pickup–drop-off locations). This paper focuses on accessibility for pickup and dropoff operations, taking a closer look at urban goods movement in the last 800 ft from the final customer. The paper presents and analyzes previously documented approaches and measures used to study the challenges at the proposed scale. Finally, it proposes a more holistic approach to address accessibility for urban pickup–delivery operations at the microscale to help develop more comprehensive urban freight transportation planning.

Although the interest in urban freight transport is growing, it is commonly seen as an area in which there is, for several reasons, a lack of research, especially if you compare it with the amount of research that deals with passenger transport. The attention of governments especially for urban goods movement has increased over recent years and with that the number of studies in the urban goods movement field. However, the practice of city logistics policies is not very often the result of detailed analyses and evaluations. This is reflected in similar types of regulations repeated through the different cities regardless of their characteristics, the same schedules for time windows and load zones, and the failure to recognise different types of urban distribution which require different types of regulations. Apart from copying regulation frameworks, however, cities hardly share information, knowledge or cooperation. The lack of national or regional bodies dealing with city logistics, as there exist for urban passenger traffic, is significant. In this paper we will address the main research contributions in city logistics and try to illustrate how the research contributions are (not) related to the daily practice of policymaking and town planning. Finally we will end with the conclusion that a real gap exists between research and practice and provide some explanations, conditions and directions for setting up new research projects.

In industrialized countries, the number of studies and surveys in the field of urban goods movement (UGM) has increased considerably over recent years. This paper compares the objectives, methods and results in this sector and focuses on nine industrialized countries of Europe, America and Asia. This non‐extensive review shows that in spite of different framework methods and models, similar trends emerge at the economic and environmental levels. It is necessary to take into account urban logistics in the broadest meaning of the term. Cooperative action seems to bear fruit providing that information and dialogue take place in the long‐term with all the operators involved. The development of intelligent transport systems (ITS) and better management of urban facilities may improve these attempts. We present our viewpoint in order to shed light on research oriented towards the sustainable management of urban logistics.

Liveability and freight transport in urban areas: the example of the Calabria Region for City Logistics

The goal of this study is to quantify and analyse the costs of road-intermodal freight transportation in Pakistan. For the design of the problem, a performance model is utilised, which provides calculations of the costs incurred in road and intermodal freight transports. Our research shows a big cost difference between road and road-rail freight transport. The results show that the cost of road freight transport is 1.48 million Pkr/day and the cost of intermodal freight transport is 1.26 million Pkr/day for the delivery of 220 tonnes of cargo to the consumers. The quantitative analysis of real-life data from one of Asia's leading paper and board businesses used in this study demonstrates operational benefits of more than 60% cost reductions when switching from road to intermodal freight (road-rail) transport. Sensitivity analysis is also presented to assist decision-makers in selecting the most efficient and cost-effective mode of transportation.