Identifying the Need for Freight to be Included in Local Authority Transport Planning - Sustainable Urban Logistics: Concepts, Methods and Information Systems - page 38

by many local authorities to manage urban freight movements. Tools of this kind
can be helpful in understanding the effects of different relocations or costs of
actions. However, it is difficult to find a model or computational process that
would easily provide the optimal solution for freight transport in an urban area;
since the destinations and amount of goods not only vary greatly throughout the
year, but often the volume of goods received fluctuate throughout the week as
larger volumes are received on Thursday's and Friday's to enable retailers to stock
up for weekend trading. It is therefore necessary to understand the effects of
different operations and activities in the urban area in order to judge their rele-
vance and importance in relation to urban freight transport planning.
Based on a study of five of the most common urban freight transport policies:
time windows, vehicle type restrictions, loading/unloading policies, fiscal policies
and the promotion of transhipment and consolidation centres, Danielis et al. ( 2010 )
confirms that policies have differentiated impacts by type of goods and distribution
channels. There is no one policy that can meet all the demands and requirements of
urban freight transport, since each policy has different effects on freight operations.
Furthermore, the area of city logistics is ever growing and there could never be a
perfect ontology to describe it—the tools and frameworks need to be continuously
developed and improved (Anand et al. 2012 ).

3 Methodology

Interviews were conducted in five countries across Northern Europe, with repre-
sentatives from local authorities (LA's) and the freight transport industry. Since
the research has originated from the authors' own individual investigations,
interviews have been performed by the authors' independently, at different loca-
tions, and thereafter compared and analysed according to the common purpose of
this chapter. In total seventy-four semi-structured interviews (see Table 1 ) each
lasting approximately 1-2 hrs were conducted over the period of study
2008-2012. The interviews focused on the perceptions of urban freight; and the
relationships between LA's and urban freight stakeholders to ascertain the variety
in behaviour and attitudes towards urban freight.
On the whole, the interviews were conducted in a face to face, personal setting,
with the exception of three telephone interviews. Halvorsen ( 1992 ) and Hellevik
( 1996 ) describe this type of interview as one where the questions asked are of an
open-ended nature, as opposed to a multiple choice of closed questions. Multiple
choice questions would have been selected if the interviews were intended to elicit

Table 1 Distribution of interviews in the five areas of study
Organisation type UK Sweden Germany Poland Lithuania

Local authorities 16 9 4 3 4

Freight stakeholders 14 8 4 7 5