Berlin International Conference of Commercial/Goods Transport in Urban Areas

Urban commercial and goods transport overlap. Summarized they account for up to 40% of the traffic in urban areas. For everyone concerned with urban policy, planning and transport operations it is therefore essential to gain a better understanding of these activities. However, it is complicated – commercial transport is often defined as including goods traffic, service movements and business trips.

Urban goods movements also include business to business flows, end-consumer’s movements (including household shopping trips and business to consumer services), postal and courier services and the activities necessary for city management such as waste collection. The transport operations responsible for much of this freight activity are devided into two broad groups: own account (i.e. artisans and some retailers carrying their own products) and transport operators or carriers working for other businesses.

Many of these activities have different characteristics in terms of type and size of the vehicles used, the products carried, and the patterns of operations including origins and destinations. This complexity explains why they are often poorly integrated in the tools and approaches used in urban planning.

European cities need to find solutions to the ambitious aims set in the recent EU White Paper on Urban Mobility concerning air pollution, noise and emissions of CO2. Because of the increasing support for these Goals by legislation, it is now essential to find better solutions for the planning and management of commercial transport and urban goods movements.

– Introduction on the issues of commercial transport in urban areas
– Data necessity and goods transport indicators for decision making processes
– Strategies and measures for the organisation of a sustainable urban commercial/goods transport
– Comparison of regulations in EU concerning commercial/ goods transport planning measures

– Integration of commercial/goods transport in urban planning processes

Conference languages: German, English, French