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
Eunomia published the ‘Municipal freight franchising’ report. A key finding was that courier and express parcel vehicles drive an estimated 2.09 million kilometres in Bristol, per annum. Municipal freight franchising was estimated to yield a reduction of over 1.63 million kilometres per year, resulting in a total of 461,984 km to deliver the same number of parcels. This yielded a total of £4.87 million in benefits over 15 years, comprising £3.44 million in benefits to fleet operators, and a further £1.43 million in environmental, social, and public health benefits.
Before this project, municipal freight franchising had yet to be explored in detail. Having completed this research, Eunomia have a firm understanding of how this could work and the environmental benefits. They are eager to explore further conversations with industry experts about its application.