Edinburgh Napier University

  Urban freight transportation (UFT) is concerned with the movement of goods in urban areas such as cities, towns and suburbs. Movements of goods indicates to delivery, collection and transit pass of the goods. Cities accommodate various economic and social activities, such as working, living, leisure as well as production. Increasing population in cities will boost the flow of goods to and from urban areas as demand and supply for certain goods and services will increase. Freight transportation contributes to local economies by producing wealth and affecting the cost of goods sold by influencing cost of freight transport, however it causes decent amount of air pollution (CO, CO2, NOx, PM10), noise nuisance, and congestion. Local authorities and businesses initiate various mitigation strategies in order to avoid hazardous impacts of road transportation such as low emission zones, time-window restrictions, shifting deliveries to off-peak hours, improvements in the fuel efficiency of vehicles, and use of urban consolidation centers (UCC). For many European countries characterized by intense urbanization, it becomes inevitable to develop an understanding of UFT requirements in local transport planning and developing comprehensive UFT-specific measures and policies. Scotland is the country, where its big cities are characterized by higher urban density. It is known that there is a significant public sector interest in Scotland for consolidation centers but the fact that none are in operation suggest difficulties in making them work and the fact that no private organization has developed; one suggests there is limited private sector interest. Previous research in other countries shows that they face many challenges and only few succeed, often with the help of supportive policies or specific collaboration situations. However, only limited work has been done on the identification of supporting policies to establish efficient UCC models. Therefore, the aim of my study is to investigate the relationship between urban consolidation centers and supportive urban freight policies, in particular to explore how and which supportive urban freight policies would be used to make consolidation centers more feasible.