Road
The Freight Space Race: Curbing the Impact of Freight Deliveries in Cities
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
5 December 2022
- Manage curb space with a focus on the needs of both passengers and goods transport.
- Apply access restrictions for delivery vehicles in urban areas while considering business practices.
- Use more logistics data to better monitor and manage freight flows.
Monitoring Progress in Urban Road Safety: 2022 Update
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
16 October 2022
- Ensure consistent collection of reliable urban road safety data.
- Create urban traffic observatories that collect both general mobility data and road safety data.
- Set ambitious reduction targets for the number of traffic crash casualties in cities.
- Focus on protecting vulnerable road users on urban streets.
- Measure crash risks for vulnerable road users with appropriate indicators.
- Adopt an integrated urban mobility plan based on Safe System principles.
Decarbonising Europe’s Trucks: How to Minimise Cost Uncertainty
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
4 September 2022
- Ensure that policies to promote direct electrification of trucks remain technology-neutral.
- Launch targeted studies and pilot projects to assess the merits of electric road systems for road freight decarbonisation.
- Further investigate decarbonisation technologies for particularly challenging road freight applications.
- Introduce policies that help zero-emission vehicles become cost-competitive sooner.
- Accelerate the deployment of zero-emission vehicle infrastructure.
- Strengthen regulations that make trucks more energy-efficient.
Streets That Fit: Re-allocating Space for Better Cities
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
16 February 2022
- Adopt meaningful indicators for how urban street space is used.
- Re-allocate street space to account for diverse uses and users.
- Prioritise people over vehicles when allocating street space.
- Explore the benefits of dynamically re-allocating certain street spaces.
- Adopt Safe System principles to guide the re-allocation of street space.
Policies to Extend the Life of Road Assets
Research Report, Policy Insights,
20 December 2018
- Introduce a proactive approach for the maintenance of road assets.
- Build a proactive, data-driven approach to the maintenance of road assets.
- Strive for continuous professionalisation in road asset management.
- Move from managing the assets to cross-asset management.
- Adopt regulatory frameworks that treat the use of road assets as an economic input.
- Implement infrastructure pricing for trucks to improve cost recovery.
- Better understand the reasons for non-compliance with truck weight limits.
- Focus on positive incentives for efficiency in regulatory and compliance frameworks.
- Develop use cases and business models for the digital infrastructure of truck traffic management.
- Create incentives for the logistics sector to implement truck traffic management.
- Improve awareness of the mutual impact that policies have on the environmental performance of road freight transport and extending the lifespan of road assets.
- Focus on creating a comprehensive regulatory environment rather than on individual measures.
The Social Impacts of Road Pricing
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
10 October 2018
- Make demand management and congestion reduction the primary objective of road pricing.
- Differentiate road pricing by location and time.
- Combine road pricing and public transport planning to improve efficiency.
- Examine the combined effects of scheme design and mitigation to understand distributional impacts.
- Consider the use of discounts and exemptions carefully.
- Develop road pricing as part of an intervention package to achieve better utilisation of urban space.
- Reconcile economic, practical and political aspects in the design of road pricing schemes.
- Differentiate charges and consider adopting a rules-based pricing approach.
Private Investment in Transport Infrastructure: Dealing with Uncertainty in Contracts
Research Report, Policy Insights,
21 June 2018
- Pursue private investment in infrastructure on the merits of improved efficiency.
- Invest more into upfront preparation of projects to reduce inefficient risk pricing by suppliers.
- Undertake a comprehensive analysis of how to assist suppliers.
- The pursuit of certainty in delivery should be balanced against cost.
- Stimulate innovation through early contractor involvement or alliancing, not public-private partnerships.
- Avoid transferring demand risk to public-private partnerships if service levels do not strongly impact demand.
- Bundle and cross-fund public-private partnerships to reduce demand risk.
- Adopt the regulatory asset base model where competition is absent or demand not strongly endogenous.
- Introduce a transparent public accounting standard to maximise the value for money of private investment.
- Foster competitive markets to achieve cost-effective infrastructure.
- Pursue data collection on how contract design affects project outcomes.
- Support the development of an evidence-supported procurement tool.
The Shared-Use City: Managing the Curb
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
23 May 2018
- Establish a system of street designations according to their primary purpose.
- Anticipate and plan for the revenue impacts of shifting curb use from car parking to passenger pick up and drop off.
- Make room for ride services at the curb where this fits strategic priorities.
- Build on or create adjudication bodies to manage diverse demand for curb space in flexible ways and ultimately in real time.
- Help develop common standards for encoding information about curb use.
- Rethink streets and their curbs as flexible, self-adjusting spaces and plan accordingly.
- Manage curb space dynamically so it adapts to different uses and users.
- Establish effective tracking and monitoring of overall transport activity, including ride services.
Safer Roads with Automated Vehicles?
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
22 May 2018
- Reinforce the Safe System approach to ensure automated vehicles are used safely.
- Apply Vision Zero thinking to automated driving.
- Avoid safety performance being used to market competing automated vehicles.
- Carefully assess the safety impacts of systems that share driving tasks between humans and machines.
- Require reporting of safety-relevant data from automated vehicles.
- Develop and use a staged testing regime for automated vehicles.
- Establish comprehensive cybersecurity principles for automated driving.
- Ensure the functional isolation of safety-critical systems and that connectivity does not compromise cybersecurity or safety.
- Provide clear and targeted messaging of vehicle capabilities.
Cooperative Mobility Systems and Automated Driving
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
2 May 2018
- Shared mobility is still a relatively new field but is progressing rapidly. With business models and preferred technologies still in flux, policy makers need to prepare considered responses to these developments without delay.
- Service concepts and technology currently and on the brink of being explored need to consider a range of design domain restrictions, dependencies on infrastructure, operating principles and user interfaces.
- Specific service concepts should be matched to specific operational environments, on a detailed local level as well as across continents and cultures.
- Government action will affect how automated vehicles will impact society. Existing approaches will not be appropriate for long. Their understanding and input will help to balance the debate on whether AVs can indeed alleviate a series of stubborn problems.
Lightening Up: How Less Heavy Vehicles Can Help Cut CO2 Emissions
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
3 November 2017
- Consider the potential of vehicle mass reduction when designing climate policies.
- Do not rely on vehicle mass reductions alone to achieve the European Union’s target of a 60% transport CO2 reduction.
- Nudge consumers into buying lighter vehicles by emphasising their benefit.
Mesurer les avantages socio-économiques des transports
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
1 October 2017
- Les directives relatives à l’ACA peuvent être élargies pour prendre en compte la fiabilité et certains effets plus larges.
- Des travaux de recherche supplémentaires sont nécessaires sur les avantages en matière de fiabilité afin d’améliorer la confiance dans les résultats.
- Les effets économiques plus larges devraient être étudiés dans les cas où l’on s’attend à ce qu’ils soient importants.
- Des travaux de recherche supplémentaires sont nécessaires sur les effets plus larges à saisir et les outils permettant de le faire.
- L’ACA peut jouer un rôle important dans la prise de décision, mais ne doit pas occuper une place prépondérante.
Managing the Transition to Driverless Road Freight Transport
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
30 May 2017
- Continue driverless truck pilot projects to test vehicles, network technology and communications protocols.
- Set international standards, road rules and vehicle regulations for self-driving trucks.
- Establish a temporary transition advisory board for the trucking industry.
- Consider a temporary permit system to manage the speed of adoption and to support a just transition for displaced drivers, while ensuring fair access to markets.
Data-led Governance of Road Freight Transport
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
30 May 2017
- Use currently available data within existing frameworks.
- Consider a completely new data-driven regulatory approach.
- Develop cross-sectoral approaches to data handling and processing.
- Investigate the best uses of new technologies, systems, and data science.
- Investigate applicability of wider and less structured big data sets.
- Consider impacts of automation of road freight vehicles.
Cycling, Health and Safety
Research Report, Policy Insights,
19 December 2013
- Insufficient evidence supports causality for the “safety in numbers” phenomenon – policies increasing the number of cyclists should be accompanied by risk-reduction actions.
- Efforts must be made to harmonise definitions of bicycle accident terminology so as to be able to make reliable international comparisons on cyclist safety.
- National authorities should set standards for, collect or otherwise facilitate the collection of data on non-fatal cycling crashes based on police reports and, in either a systematic or periodic way, on hospital records.
- Authorities seeking to improve cyclists’ safety should adopt the Safe System approach - policy should focus on improving the inherent safety of the traffic system, not simply on securing marginal improvements for cyclists in an inherently unsafe system.
- Authorities should establish top-level plans for cycling and cycling safety and should ensure high-level coordination among relevant government agencies to ensure that cycling grows without aggravating safety performance.
- Speed management acts as “hidden infrastructure” protecting cyclists and should be included as an integral part of cycle safety strategies.
- Cyclists should not be the only target of cycling safety policies – motorists are at least as important to target.
- Where appropriate, traffic speeds should be limited to less than 30km/hr where bicycles and motorised traffic mix but care should be taken so that speed control devices do not create hazards for cyclists.