In December, two VVD MPs put questions to State Secretary Mansveld of Infrastructure and Environment about the proliferation of municipal environmental zones. Each municipality has different requirements for vehicles wanting to enter the city centre, so that shop distribution specialists have to find different solutions for each city centre and make extra investments in the fleet. Making efficient and profitable transport planning is made almost impossible by all the regulations, if it wasn't already because of the tight time slots that are also different everywhere.
Decentralisation
The question is whether the state secretary is heeding calls for more coordination between all municipal initiatives, now that the government is decentralising more and more tasks to the same municipalities in other policy areas such as care and employment. Decentralisation can work fine, but creates problems when it comes to tasks organised on a national scale. Urban distribution is a case in point. Logistics service providers who have specialised in this branch of logistics can only set up efficient and sustainable operations if they are allowed to make round trips with their trucks along several cities. If regulations vary from city to city, this becomes virtually impossible.
On a local scale, initiatives have sprung up everywhere in recent years, often consisting of electric vehicles - and sometimes a boat - taking care of the last mile. Logistics service providers can drop off their shipments at the edge of town, after which these local parties handle them further. The problem is that volumes often leave much to be desired, so most initiatives are still too dependent on subsidies. A major cause is that for many logistics service providers, and certainly retailers, there are few incentives to use these services.
Green Deal
The agreement signed in November by 54 parties to work together towards emission-free city distribution is a step in the right direction. In this Green Deal Zero Emission City Logistics, governments and companies have agreed to jointly develop and implement pilot projects and learn from each other. The first results will be announced in 2020, after which promising initiatives will be scaled up.
A good intention, but it all sounds rather non-committal. Signatories include the municipality of Utrecht, for example, while Amsterdam has also indicated its intention to join. However, both municipalities have indicated almost simultaneously that they want to expand their environmental zones. It makes sense for the two VVD MPs to want to know from the state secretary whether one is consistent with the other.
Line services with vans
Perhaps a solution would be for the municipalities to go a big step further and close the city completely to trucks from outside. This could be done if, as with public transport, they grant multi-year concessions to only one or perhaps two carriers to provide transport in the city. Logistics service providers will then be forced to hand over their goods to these concessionaires, who will thus have sufficient volume to set up cost-effective, emission-free and thus sustainable urban transport concepts.
At the same time, this offers opportunities for completely new forms of service, such as scheduled services in the form of delivery vans that leave every hour from the central city depot to residential areas to deliver parcels to homes. This, in turn, provides a boost for local small businesses, enabling them to deliver customers' orders to their homes within a few hours on the same day. An idea for a testing ground?
Marcel te Lindert
