Approaches to Managing Freight in Metropolitan Areas

The flow of freight in metropolitan areas has emerged as a major urban planning challenge. Most urban freight is moved in trucks. Although trucks make up a relatively small share of all vehicle traffic, they generate a disproportionate share of many externalities, including congestion on local streets and highways, infrastructure damage, vehicle emissions, greenhouse gases, and noise. The purpose of this paper is to examine strategies, policies, and practices that have been implemented in different countries to manage freight impacts on metropolitan areas and assess their effectiveness and potential for transferability. Researchers and local stakeholders have explored a broad range of measures aimed at reducing truck travel, emissions, or carbon consumption. Examples include freight partnerships, smaller or newer trucks, better routing algorithms, consolidated local delivery stations, alternative modes, off-peak deliveries, and low-emission zones. These efforts have had varying levels of success. On the basis of an extensive review of the literature, an assessment of the most effective strategies for solving urban freight problems is presented. The authors find that policy strategies and outcomes are quite different between the United States and the European Union and explain these differences as a function of local context, including political and regulatory structures. They conclude that experimentation is extensive and that there appear to be many possibilities for addressing urban freight externalities. More research and more careful and comprehensive evaluations of policy experiments are suggested by the authors to improve the understanding of urban freight problems. The paper is organized as follows: Section 2 discusses the nature of the urban freight problem and the challenges of effectively addressing freight problems. Section 3 provides an overview of policies and strategies organized around four major urban freight areas: 1) freight flows in the metropolitan core; 2) emissions; 3) metropolitanwide truck vehicle miles traveled; and 4) freight hubs. Section 4 presents conclusions, and Section 5 offers suggestions for EU-U.S. collaborative research.