Paving the way for efficient urban freight delivery
Project: Evaluating loading dock capacity in new developments
Project partners: Transport for NSW, University of Melbourne
It’s not often that a new solution comes along that helps solve some of your business headaches for you – with no effort or cost on your part. However, that is the reality of a new tool for urban freight planning that promises to help ease the pain of urban last mile deliveries in NSW and which could be applied elsewhere in the future.
Background
Last mile delivery is one of the more challenging and costly elements within the supply chain. It can be particularly difficult in the dense urban environments found in our Australian cities. These locations need to have high liveability and accessibility, whilst managing significant space competition and constraints.
With constrained kerbside also an increasing factor, poor planning of new developments can lead to insufficient loading capacity resulting in congestion, pollution, road safety impacts and reduced amenity in the delivery area. Freight operators bear the brunt of delays and uncertain deliveries with the flow on impacts of inefficiency in the supply chain and reduced customer satisfaction.
There is a growing trend of large new urban developments – or substantial changes to existing ones – in our cities. The proposals for these developments must specify the space needed to receive deliveries at the planning stage. However, developers have many competing priorities when planning a building which may be considered in conflict with well-functioning freight loading and unloading facilities. The attractiveness of the public-facing aspects of the space can often be a higher priority, for example.
A common approach to calculating the required space is to copy what has been done at another location. This is often not a suitable comparison and provides little in the way of a robust evidence base for their decisions on dock capacity. All of this can lead to a development that is not serviceable and which generates a negative impact on the local environment.
Given the importance of last mile deliveries to the functioning of our urban areas, Transport for NSW (TfNSW) is supporting developers and planners through the development of its Freight and Servicing Last Mile Toolkit, released in 2021.
Freight and Servicing Last Mile Toolkit
Michael Stokoe is Director of Urban Freight at Transport for NSW and is leading the development and rollout of the Toolkit.
“The Toolkit equips stakeholders with the understanding of how to plan for urban deliveries in a new development or redevelopment,” Michael explains.
“It provides guidelines and tools that make the process much easier, less expensive, and much more accurate than previous methods, eliminating the need for costly activities such as surveying.”
A new element of the Toolkit is the Urban Freight Forecasting Model. The Model helps planners understand the freight and servicing traffic a building or development will generate and can test how proposed loading dock capacity will perform. The Model enables improved, insightful and expedited forecasting of urban freight activity for buildings which in turn improves planning and architectural decision-making regarding loading dock capacity.
TfNSW decided to go through iMOVE, the national transport R&D coordination centre, to access the expertise of researchers at the University of Melbourne to assist with development of the Model. This approach enabled TfNSW to access academic expertise to refine the forecasting techniques, ensuring they are robust and that there is capability for continuous improvement and relevance from the addition of new datasets.
For the end users of the Model, this translates into detailed insights of freight and servicing activity that allows them to understand the way traffic profiles interact with the available loading dock space and plan accordingly. For freight and servicing companies it means better service in access to buildings when they need it, increased accessibility, and reduced wait time or futile trips.
To achieve these positive outcomes, the Model presents information in an interactive and visual way that allows for iterative parameter adjustments to see what the impact of increasing or reducing loading dock capacity – and other changes – may be on a building or development.
“This represents a significant shift in planning approaches from a ‘predict and provide’ approach to an insightful ‘vision and validate’ approach,” explains Michael.
“It provides much richer information to planners, developers and consultants on which to base and validate decisions, for example, giving profiles of traffic over timeslots throughout the day. The approach we have taken also makes it very user friendly and can accelerate planning processes.”
Gaining popularity
The Model is now available to users by signing up on the TfNSW website. Even in these early days it is already proving popular with councils and consultants. While it is essentially a freely available decision support tool, at least one authority has already taken it a step further and mandated its use.
The robustness of the Model’s dataset, model and outputs forms the basis of its success.
“The performance of the Model is critical to its uptake,” says Michael. “Results must be reliable and accurate, and this is where iMOVE and the University of Melbourne helped us create extremely robust models.”
Urban freight delivery challenges clearly resonate with much of the world. The Model has also gained some favourable international feedback from peers in London.
“The forecasting method and Model we have developed is at the forefront of planning for freight and servicing globally, which was our intent,” says Michael.
The Model and other elements of the Toolkit deliver a win-win scenario to many urban stakeholders with competing priorities. This includes those managing an increasing freight task alongside those concerned with enhanced liveability in our growing cities.
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