Planning and Optimization Methods for Advanced Urban Logistics Systems at Tactical Level - Sustainable Urban Logistics: Concepts, Methods and Information Systems - page 156

base of good collaboration, if one or more partners manage confidential infor-
mation that they do not want to share for competitive reasons, the efficiency of
the system can be considerably reduced.

Furthermore, other factors have to be considered, like for example transport
cost optimization is seen by loaders as a competence of the transport operator.
Finally, it is important to note that multi-stage transport systems entail the par-
ticipation of several operators, so that coordinated optimization is not easy to
organize but can be the key of success is well-managed.

5 Conclusion

Urban freight data serves a wide range of uses and is extremely important in
helping public and private sector decision-makers to ensure that urban freight
transport takes place in as efficient and sustainable a manner as possible. Without
such freight data, it is extremely difficult for national, regional and urban
authorities to make decisions on issues including road space allocation and con-
gestion, freight transport's role in energy consumption and air quality, safety and
security

issues associated with freight transport, modal shift, and land use

planning.
The extent of urban freight data collection varies significantly between the
European countries surveyed. In addition, even in countries with the greatest
quantity of urban freight data, most of this is derived from the disaggregation of
data collections that take place at a greater geographical scale than the urban area.
Freight data is currently collected by a large number of different organizations
including: national, regional and urban governments, other public sector bodies
and agencies on behalf of these governments, as part of one-off studies and pro-
jects, and by private sector organizations including industrial, retail, service and
transport companies, trade associations and market research companies. These
urban freight data collection efforts are not currently co-ordinated, and this results
in many different data sources and data sets that vary widely in quality and
methodology, making comparisons and combinations of them difficult or impos-
sible. Even in the countries in which the greatest quantity of urban freight data is
collected, when all of this urban freight data is brought together, it still does not
provide a comprehensive picture of the urban freight transport system. Instead, the
picture provided is patchy and unreliable.

References

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