THE IMPORTANCE OF THE CITY LOGISTICS MANAGER FOR THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT OF URBAN FREIGHT TRANSPORT

Urban Freight Transport (UFT) generates a vast number of important problems that impact on city inhabitants' life quality level. These problems include, among other things, freight traffic, lack of parking spaces, environmental impact (noise, pollution), considerable energy consumption as well as a lower safety and security level. Local authorities have a number of relevant responsibilities in the area of transport, like parking policy, public transport planning and management (by controlled public transport companies), traffic management, mobility management, land use and urban design. However, they usually fulfil their role only with regard to the organization and development of passenger transport. Nevertheless, local authorities can also impact on goods transport flows, especially urban distribution and delivering. This paper is focused on the new kind of function in the city municipality organizational structure - the City Logistics Manager. The main tasks of this function include: rationalizing and optimizing goods distribution and collection in the urban area, which is to help reduce traffic congestion, environmental impact of the UFT as well as increase efficiency of the freight flows in the city centre. The overarching idea is to reach the balance between the environmental (especially energy consumption and pollution), social and economic advantages. The assumptions for establishing the function of the City Logistics Manager, which are presented in this paper, are the results of the experiments implemented in Szczecin under the international project named C-LIEGE.