On Friday 8th April MOVE21 was invited to join the webinar titled “Benefits and challenges of combination of freight and passenger transport”, organised by POLIS and ALICE-ETP.
Over the next few months, POLIS will be joining ALICE- to deliver a webinar series on the future of urban freight, bringing public and private actors together for one of the most comprehensive conversations yet.
The first webinar of the POLIS – ALICE series on urban freight has given the floor to the EU-funded projects SPROUT and MOVE21, to better understand their approach to better combine freight and passenger hubs, facilities, and strategies. Benefits, challenges and regulatory barriers for local authorities and logistics operators will be discussed in the open discussion.
The first event was open to the respective members of the two abovementioned networks, and also SPROUT and MOVE21 consortia. Around 85 participants attended the webinar online.
The long-standing POLIS-ALICE partnership seeks to forge synergies between projects, initiatives, cities-regions and companies to accelerate innovation. As a result, the meeting heard from outcomes of current projects working on this topic, exploring potential for scalability and transferability.
The webinar heard from logistics practitioners and public transport operators, who discussed current practices, R&I, thus identifying barriers to progress and providing insight into avenues for action.
Marco Mazzarino (Venice University) and Carlo Massetto (Municipality of Padova) joined to provide an overview of the cargo-hitching approach and the state-of-the-art and main challenges of this application in Padova (Italy).
The MOVE21 project coordinator Tiina Ruohonen (City of Oslo) and Suzanne Green (City of Gothenburg) gave an overview of the project objectives and briefly introduced what the two cities are expecting to do in the next months in their pilot sites.
The final round table between public transport operator and logistics operator was moderated by Paola Cossu (FIT Consulting) and Gerard Martret (Shotl) and highlighted the following key-points:
- Combination can be done through sharing vehicles, transport infrastructure and assets, (e.g. tramways, depots), as well as sharing road spaces;
- “Very” last mile deliveries should be considered, e;g. transporting parcels from public transport hubs to end users; This can be done through micro-hub (e.g. smart lockboxes) or drivers of public transport serve (particularly those who provide door-to-door services) as “trusted person” for delivering parcels;
- Need for more research into study of current regulations and to provide evidence-based support for policy reforms.