Data Collection for Understanding Urban Goods Movement - Sustainable Urban Logistics: Concepts, Methods and Information Systems - page 81

The responses suggest that there are few indicators that are currently in use by
national, regional or local governments in the surveyed countries to monitor the
performance of urban freight transport. The most commonly used indicators are
related to road freight and include: goods vehicle trips, and goods vehicle kilo-
metres (usually based on traffic count data). However, even these indicators are not
available in many European urban areas.
Other indicators that are commonly used by governments to measure and
monitor freight transport at a national level include: tonnes lifted (by road and
other modes), and tonnes moved (i.e. tonne-kilometres by road and other modes).
However these indicators are often not available at an urban scale.
Other national freight transport indicators used by governments in one or more
European countries include:
• Freight Intensity (of heavy goods vehicles—tonne-kilometres/GDP)
• Lorry traffic intensity (of heavy goods vehicles—vehicle kilometres/GDP)
• Energy intensity (Fuel consumed per tonne-kilometre)
• Average length of haul
• Lading factor
• Empty running
None of the indicators listed above has been calculated for urban freight
transport (with the exception of average length of haul, lading factor and empty
running in London, produced from data disaggregated from the national survey).
This is due to the data requirements of doing so, and a lack of consideration of
freight indicators at the urban scale by all tiers of government.
A few research projects have produced other indicators of urban freight
transport. A selection of these from projects carried out in France and the UK are
shown in Table 2 . These indicators have been calculated from one-off data col-
lection exercises that have not been repeated. In the case of France, all of the
indicators shown in Table 2 can be calculated using the FRETURB model
developed by Laboratoire d'Economie des Transports (LET) at the University of
Lyon.
It is important to note that the questionnaire responses have highlighted that
there is little common understanding or agreement about what constitutes an urban
freight transport indicator. Also, it is not always clear from respondents' answers
whether an indicator that they have identified is currently in use or is being
suggested as a potentially useful indicator.
8 Synthesis, Discussion and Recommendations
In this section we propose first a synthesis and a discussion of the proposed
overview then a set of recommendations for data collection in the context of urban
logistics.