The Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg is one of Germany’s 16 federal states and the second largest city in Germany. The Hamburg metropolitan region is home to more than five million people. Working near its busy port (3rd busiest port in Europe) has always defined Hamburg’s socio-economic environment, making it one of the industrial hotspots in Northern Germany. Over 40% of goods entering the Hamburg port are put on lorries onward to the Hamburg hinterland. The revised Hamburg Climate Plan, which was adopted in December 2019, requires a 55% reduction in climate emissions by 2030 compared to 1990 baseline.

Metropolitan cities like Hamburg are confronted with the challenge of modernising important national and international transport hubs. Three out of nine major European transport arteries – the TEN-T corridors –intersect in Hamburg. Around 40,000 trucks drive into the Port of Hamburg every day, and more than ten percent of all rail freight journeys in Germany start or finish there. Each day, around 500,000 people commute to and from Hamburg. All forecasts predict that traffic will further increase on transregional transport routes. Digital transformation and the use of digital technologies will play a key role here.

Hamburg has been a testbed for innovative logistics solutions to handle the sharp increase in deliveries. Learning from these pilots, a significant solution is (company-independent) consolidation of goods in microhubs with last-mile distribution using cargo-bikes or by foot. An evaluation of a micro-hub pilot carried out by UPS in the Hamburg city centre confirmed these positive effects and a study on last-mile logistics concluded that 100-150 micro-hubs would be enough to shift 40% of last-mile deliveries to cargo-bikes.

Hamburg wants to benefit from these opportunities and improves its use of digital technologies to make transportation more efficient, safer, and more environmentally friendly. By adopting the Intelligent Transport System (ITS) Strategy in Hamburg on 26 April 2016, the City of Hamburg has now taken an important first step towards “Transport 4.0”.

Overview of the first set of measures

The Living Lab Hamburg envisioned the pilot implementation of different measures in the framework of MOVE21. A central element in the concept of the Living Lab Hamburg was the conceptualisation and pilot implementation of multi-functional ‘neighbourhood hubs’ that included offers regarding mobility for people and logistics as well as social/cultural aspects. Logistic measures considered included neighbourhood-scale logistic operations of storage, delivery, and pick-up. The focus was on last mile deliveries or first mile pick-ups via cargo bikes. Mobility measures were addressed, for instance, on passenger micro-mobility, sharing or on-demand solutions, or complementary to transportation measures, such as bike workshops or self-repair and service points. Specific uses involving social and cultural actions were planned to be implemented in hubs with available space for actions of this type. These uses aimed at adding social value, enhancing the social buy-in connected to the feeling of ownership.

In addition to the pilot implementation of multi-functional ‘neighbourhood hubs’, the Living Lab Hamburg addressed the inter-hub logistic traffic. In order to reduce the traffic of the individual carriers, consolidation of cargo was considered.

A third element addressed by the Living Lab Hamburg was the combined transport of people and goods. The use of on-demand shuttles was one option, but other services were also considered for analysis, simulation and, if feasible, pilot implementation.

Focus areas and test sites

The focus area of the activities of the Living Lab Hamburg was the District of Altona. Situated in the western part of the city and bordered by the river Elbe to the south, Altona, with its 275,000 inhabitants, included neighbourhoods with very different population and building density and characteristics. The Living Lab Hamburg envisioned activities in the dense core area of the district, located in the eastern part of Altona, as well as activities in one or more of the northern, rather sub-urban neighbourhoods. In addition, the industrial areas in immediate vicinity of the national highway and TEN-T corridor A7 were planned as a test site.

The concept of the Living Lab Hamburg foresaw a phase-based approach in order to ensure that the different measures could build upon each other, and experiences and lessons learnt could be considered already during the project duration of MOVE21. The iterative approach included the following four phases (figure 1):

• Phase 1: Establishment of multifunctional neighbourhood hubs in the eastern, densely populated urban part of the District of Altona
• Phase 2: Creation of connections between the neighbourhood hubs established in Phase 1 via simulated or real inter-hub traffic with one hub acting as start/end point
• Phase 3: Focus on the extension of the previously realised implementations to the third largest commercial and industrial area of Hamburg in the north-western part of the district and sub-urban neighbourhoods in the northern part.

Plan for the implementations of solutions

The pilot implemented various innovative aspects. These included:

• the multi-functional use of the hubs, including integrated solutions for mobility of passengers and goods as well as social/cultural offers where possible;
• the testing of inter-hub logistic traffic in order to increase the efficiency of delivery traffic, create new business models, and analyse synergies on the first/last mile that were yet undetected;
• the development of a set of measures that described and evaluated potential modules of a ‘neighbourhood hub’ and helped implement customised hubs in further parts of the City of Hamburg and beyond.

If you have ideas or suggestions that can be useful, please do not hesitate to contact:

• Julia Peleikis, Project manager for the Hamburg Living Lab
  julia.peleikis@sk.hamburg.de