Focus of work
The focus of Eunomia’s work is to research, develop, and model the business case for new market-based mechanisms designed to encourage more environmentally sustainable operational behaviours in the last-mile freight market.
The negative impacts of last-mile freight in urban areas, such as growing road traffic emissions, congestion, and negative impacts on vulnerable road user safety, are becoming more severe. This may be due to the proliferation of smaller players and independents in the market, duplicating the same activity; stemming from increased demand for smaller, more frequent collections and deliveries, e-commerce, outsourcing of service functions, rapid response, and less stringent regulatory regimes for light duty vehicles compared to heavy goods vehicles.
Electrification will not address the full range of negative externalities from this sector since it does not incentivise the use of fewer vehicles on the roads. Therefore, a more comprehensive approach which seeks to change operational practice in the industry will likely be needed. This work will seek to identify the necessary market-based mechanisms to achieve this outcome and model their impacts.
Impact
The findings of this research will be shared amongst the local and regional authorities with which Eunomia works on a regular basis, with a view to demonstrating the potential local level impacts of regulatory frameworks for urban freight. The hope is that with these findings they will be able to identify potential partners to trial the concept and collect real world data which may be used to create a business case for change at a national level.