Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
to achieve even a basic understanding. Even in those urban areas in which much
urban freight data has been collected in past surveys, the lack of repeat surveys in
subsequent years can result in a deterioration in this understanding.
10 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 about issues including road space allocation and congestion, 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 organisations
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 organisations 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.
The quantity and coverage of available urban freight data in all countries
surveyed is still far less than either: (i) freight data available at a national level, or
(ii) urban passenger transport data. This is due to the fact that all levels of gov-
ernment have traditionally focussed on passenger transport data collection rather
than freight data (at national, regional and urban levels), together with the fact that
much freight data (urban and elsewhere) is held by private organisations and is not
made generally available by them. In addition, urban authorities tend to have far
fewer resources available for continuous or periodic freight data collection than
national governments.
The description provided in this chapter is a first step towards a better under-
standing of the state of urban freight data collection in Europe. It is important to
focus on how to make best use of existing national and urban freight data col-
lection resources in order to maximise the usefulness of the urban freight data
collected. As new resources for urban freight data collection are made available, it
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