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.

The article presents a method which helps local authorities to evaluate urban freight transport models. Given the complex requirements for input data and the inability to supply them for most cities, a proper quantitative evaluation of model functionality may be quite difficult for local authorities. Freight transport models designed to support sustainable urban freight transport objectives are a particular example. To overcome these difficulties, the structure of the method is based on a qualitative analysis of strategic and operational conditions of urban freight management for modelling purposes. A consistent set of criteria is developed to help with parameterising strategic objectives and the analytical requirements of tools to achieve those objectives. The problems of data availability and capture are also included. The method consists of three tiers that are arranged hierarchically to reflect the interrelations. The proposed method was verified against Gdynia’s (Poland) urban freight management requirements. The city was chosen for its early experience of urban freight studies and improvement measures and because it has already defined its strategic objectives. Two comprehensive freight transport models (Freturb and Wiver) and existing city’s transport model were evaluated. The results have ruled out the existing transport model rendering it ineffective as a tool to support urban freight management to meet the city’s strategic objectives. While Freturb turned out to be much better suited for the needs, dedicated models still face a basic barrier of cities having to redesign their systems for collecting urban transport data.

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