Influence of urban form on urban freight trip generation

Abstract

Urban freight is a key driver of the economy. Increasing population and rapid urbanisation is contributing to increased freight on urban roads, which in turn is resulting in greater emission levels, and congestion on urban roads. Transport and urban planners, researchers, industry groups and policy makers are trying to cope with the challenges to make cities sustainable and liveable. While there has been significant volume of work done on the effects of transport and land use with respect to passenger transport, effect of various land use variables on freight needs to be further explored. This paper aims to address this gap of analysing freight trip generation models with respect to built environment variables such as population density, commercial density, land use mix, that are likely to influence the freight trip generation patterns (FTG) by mode. While freight trip generation is inelastic with respect to price as compared to passenger transport, spatial structure of the city is a crucial factor in the locational decision of all freight receiving entities. The analysis is performed with a dataset from an establishment survey conducted for the city of New Delhi for freight trip generation models and secondary information for land use variables are used.