Urban freight transport: learning from the practices in two countries

Holland and Japan, like other countries, are confronted with a growing need for freight transport. Although multimodal transportation modes will, gain more market share in the future, the scenarios for the next decades still predict a continuous growth of truck transport. Therefore, reducing congestion problems and their negative environmental impacts seems to be an important goal for the local governments of both countries. Next to these reductions, improving the quality of the living environment is also a common goal for the governments in the field of City Logistics. Various policy measures are taken by the local authorities to satisfy some of these goals. With the 'Shared Trucking programme' the Japanese government is directly interfering in the use of co-operative freight transport systems. Also the Dutch government is interfering with the raising of public centres, the City Distribution Centres, set up according to the long-term program for traffic and transport in the Netherlands. Confronted with the differences in policy measures the research orientations have also a different scope. The way of modelling and implementing are, at a glance, completely different, but the integration of both leads to new promising ideas. The results of the research joint venture between Kyoto University and the Technical University of Delft are discussed in this paper.