Posted on: August 24, 2016
Running an urban delivery business comes with its own, unique set of headaches. Parking enforcements, timed deliveries, congestion charges and the general rough and tumble of navigating a choked city centre are a headache, and that’s before the impending introduction of London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone and the prospect of other big towns and cities following suit.
But commercial vehicle operators have always been at the sharp end of city logistics, even as far back as the 1980s, when the London Lorry Ban came into force.
“In the early 80s, the then government abolished what was the Greater London Council and so the London Lorry Ban was introduced, which subsequently became the London Road Control Scheme,” says Ian Wainwright, head of freight and fleet programmes at Transport for London (TfL), “that was a way of providing the 33 separate boroughs with a degree of control over the movement of HGVs without the GLC being there.”
But it was the Millennium that was the real cut-off point, says Wainwright. “When we got the first directly elected mayor, Ken Livingstone, in 2000, one of the things he put into his first transport strategy was to start thinking about freight and its impact”, he said. “So, in 2003/2004, TfL got a load of stakeholders together and set up a freight team. Since then, TfL has started thinking a bit more sensibly about how freight works.”
The capital’s subsequent crackdown on freight has caused large, conventional logistics companies to adopt new practices. “We’ve moved away from national distribution centres to micro supply warehouses,” says Martin Dougherty, Vice President, business development & account management for DHL supply chain, automotive.
“There are stock-holding locations of primary parts in city centres and we’re serving those outlets at night by truck, albeit with small, panel van-sized vehicles. Rather than great big warehouses at the side of motorways – they still exist but their footprint is smaller than it used to be – we’re strategically stock-holding in city centres to allow same-day services.”
Gnewt runs a fleet of fully electric vehicles across London
Gnewt runs a fleet of fully electric vehicles across London
Along with legislation, technology has given rise to last-mile delivery companies operating electric vehicles. Gnewt runs a fleet of around 100 electric vans, primarily within the London Congestion Charge zone, where it claims to deliver 8-10,000 parcels a day. The vehicles cover little in terms of mileage. “It can be measured in yards or metres for some drivers,” says executive director, Sam Clarke.
Clarke believes one of the biggest pressures on the courier and logistics industries is expectation. “The customer is now driving the decision making process so they want things now, within the hour or the same day, and that’s putting a huge amount of strain on the streets because you’ve got more and more vehicles on road with more bespoke offerings. When we started, it was much more milk round – you had your parcels in the vans at the beginning of the day, you got them all delivered and that was it.”
“Then there’s the tag of free delivery – I loathe that expression. There is no such thing as free delivery; someone’s paying for it, and it should always be labelled as such in my opinion. People just think stuff materialises and it’s easy – it isn’t.”
Plenty of other organisations are also honing the urban delivery issue. The Institute of Couriers has recently proposed an apprenticeship to train managers in the parcel sector to better handle final-mile deliveries, while Danish firm Trefor has developed an entirely new vehicle.
The Tripl is a cross between a car and a scooter according to the company’s sales director, Steen Laursen. “It’s a three-wheel, all-electric urban cargo vehicle. The front end is like a car: it has two wheels, a Macpherson suspension system and the complete frontal area is for cargo – there’s 750 litres in the standard version. The back end is like a motorcycle or scooter, so you hop on and drive it with the handlebars.”
Trefor TRIPL could soon be available for lease from £160 a month
Trefor Tripl could soon be available for lease from £160 a month
The Tripl is powered by a 4kW electric motor, has a 100km range and can stop 10 times per hour in an average city centre, twice as frequently as a delivery van, according to Laursen. It has yet to go on sale in the UK but Trefor is working on a contract hire arrangement with leasing firm Leaseplan and expects to offer it for around £160 a month.
Laursen says it’s aimed primarily at the post and parcel segment and any business that has to park in urban areas, off the public road.
“They can drive to where the service has to be done, which could be in front of flats, the zoo, in the park, on a construction site – anywhere you have to drive on paths and non-road areas. It’s also going to be used in a new tunnel connecting Denmark and Germany.”
Of course, London is always in the spotlight for anything to do with urban transport but change is afoot in other cities across the UK. Council leaders in Greater Manchester have this month approved plans for a Low-Emission Strategy and Air Quality Action Plan, after a public consultation that will see the city take on a new Euro 6 bus fleet and examine the possibility of a Clean Air Zone, similar to London’s ULEZ.
Gnewt, too, is about to set up in Oxford and plans to expand to Birmingham and Manchester. “Councils are very keen to see zero emissions solutions and whilst London is a unique infrastructure, I think there are a lot of parallels to be drawn with other cities,” says Clarke, “Southampton, for example, is a very high emitting city that’s trying to do something about it and there are many others like it.”
“Sheffield has the Eco Stars programme, which is a voluntary air quality scheme,” says TFL’s Wainwright, “Birmingham is also looking at air quality issues and all the other UK cities are starting to think about what to do.
“Europe has exactly the same problems with historic road networks and growing populations, so we’ve been working with some European cities through Polis [a network of European cities collaborating on transport issues].”
“We’ve had conversations with New York, Sydney, Beijing, Sao Paulo – a whole range of people across the world who are also looking at different ways of managing this approach.
“What we try to do is take what is already out there. There are some very simple solutions for freight; you need to reduce the number of trips on the road network, make sure the timing of that activity is right and make sure you minimise the impact of any vehicles that do occur. It’s fairly simple, but people can make it very complicated when you try and deliver them.”