Large urban freight traffic generators: Opportunities for city logistics initiatives

Abstract

This paper develops procedures to identify and quantify the role played by large urban freight traffic generators as contributors of truck traffic in metropolitan areas. Although ports, container terminals, and other industrial sites are usually associated with large generations of truck trips, they only represent a small proportion of the total trips produced and attracted in large metropolitan areas. This paper analyzes the importance of other facilities such as ordinary businesses or buildings that individually or collectively (clusters) generate a large proportion of truck traffic. The paper discusses the opportunities of these large traffic generators for city logistics initiatives. In addition, the paper introduces two effective and complementary procedures to identify these generators using freight trip generation models estimated by the authors.

Data stories from urban loading bays

“…Based on the average number of truck trips per business observed during our data collection, we estimated 37,500 truck trips generated daily by these malls, an average of 330 truck trips per mall. This number is not too far from other estimates found in the literature; for instance Jaller et al [1] found that the Grand Central Station of New York hosts 184 businesses and attracts 100 to 250 trucks per day. Eidhammer et al (2016) [29] reports an average of 5.1 shipments per week generated by a retail located in a shopping mall, and compared it with an average of 4.7 shipments/week for a retail store located on-street.…”

“…Although this initiative is relatively unexplored, it could reduce parking congestion since (1) it reduces the parking durations, and therefore increase the parking turnover at the loading bay and (2) it gives vehicles' drivers more freedom in choosing the arrival time and in scheduling their deliveries. However, to be effective, we recommend that such centralized receiving stations should (1) operate off-peak and outside the store opening times and (2) should be able to handle pick-ups, namely retrieving the goods from the stores and staging them at the loading bay until the drivers arrive at the mall.…”

“…Large urban Freight traffic Generators (LFGs) are defined by Jaller et al (2015) as Bspecific facilities housing businesses that individually or collectively produce and attract a large number of daily truck trips^ [1].…”

“…policies and regulations enacted by the public sector to foster sustainable logistics practices [5]. Examples of suitable initiatives for LFGs are: centralized receiving [1,6], off-hours delivery programmes [7,8], off-site consolidation programmes [9][10][11], parking pricing [12] and loading bay reservation systems [13].…”

An Examination of Last Mile Delivery Practices of Freight Carriers Servicing Business Receivers in Inner-City Areas

“…Although most towers do not cover a large footprint, the various businesses in these towers collectively generate more freight movements as compared to on-street retailers and the businesses located within a single city block [27]. For instance, freight deliveries to businesses located within 56 neighbouring buildings in Manhattan, New York, accounted for about 4% of the total truck movements in all of Manhattan, which encompasses thousands of other buildings and business establishments [28]. In addition, businesses in commercial towers receive a large volume of express mail deliveries.…”