Abstract

The increasing awareness of non-sustainable impacts of urban freight movements on city traffic congestion, environment, and economy has boosted the amount of research in this area in recent years. Implementation of freight regulatory initiatives (policies) such as access-timing-sizing restrictions has become very important to deal with the nuisances associated with freight transport in cities. There is a lack of holistic understanding of the implications of freight transport policies on traffic management and no specific methodology aimed at analyzing, planning, and implementing urban freight regulatory policies exists in literature. In this thesis, we address the problem of evaluating and implementing freight regulatory initiatives for better traffic management in cities. The first part of the thesis presents an integrated approach based on microscopic traffic simulation and design of experiments for evaluating and selecting freight restriction policies for a specific city. In the second part, a conceptual implementation model is proposed for implementing the selected freight restriction policies by addressing the decentralized urban freight management problem and socioeconomic values of freight from cities point of view.