Estimated Data Production for Urban Goods Transport Diagnosis - Sustainable Urban Logistics: Concepts, Methods and Information Systems - page 115

• knowledge of the locations of the various economic activities in the city;
• knowledge of the management and organization of the transportation of goods
which serve these activities;
• knowledge of the characteristics of the various modes and the various vehicles
used.
2.3 Which Methods for which Objectives?
In order to answer the stakes described above, three main kinds of objectives have
to be assigned:
• To understand how and by whom goods flows are generated: what is the
importance of the different urban activities in the generation of pick-ups and
deliveries?
• To obtain a thorough description of all the urban logistics involved: how many
pick-ups and deliveries are carried out in the city and its surroundings? Who is
ensuring the transport? How many kilometres are generated by these activities,
which vehicles are used, who is running these vehicles, what goods and pack-
aging are most often used, how many empty trips are made, how are they
organized (direct trips, rounds of different sizes, according to the packaging and
the weight of the shipments, etc.)?
• To help authorities in their decision-making: build decision aid models in order
to answer how much traffic will be generated by new activities in the city. How
can the indicators for urban goods transport be assessed in order to compare
different territories and different policy measures? How can the impacts of
different scenarios for the future be compared?
3 Methodological Aspects
To meet the stakes and objectives set out above, the French National Program on
Urban Goods Movement ordered a set of quantitative surveys performed in three
different cities. The aim of these surveys was twofold: on the one hand, they would
lead to understanding of the behavioural and organizational aspects of urban
pickups and deliveries; on the other hand, they would fuel a tool that would be
used to make diagnoses of urban logistics without the need for collecting large
amounts of data, thereby reducing costs. Therefore the survey methodology and
the model architecture were strongly related and developed in parallel. In this
section we define the methodology of both the survey and the diagnosis tool.