Background and motivation

The concept of the 15-minute city envisages neighbourhoods in which all essential services are accessible within 15 minutes. The aim is to make essential services accessible without the need for a car and to create liveable residential environments. This entails a certain degree of concentration of services (retail, education, services, catering, culture…) in areas that have previously been underserved. This dynamic also has a fundamental impact on urban freight transport. However, the exact nature of this impact (where is freight transport increasing or decreasing? How is consumer behaviour in online retail being influenced?) remains largely unknown.

This tension has not yet been sufficiently incorporated into existing 15-minute city concepts. Furthermore, a lack of comprehensive data hinders evidence-based planning to mitigate its negative impacts (e.g. congestion, air pollution, limited accessibility, pressure on public space). This lack of integration into planning concepts complicates the development of sustainable planning strategies and measures, as does the lack of usable and, above all, transferable data on urban freight transport. 

To address this problem, POTUS involves relevant stakeholders (city administrations, academia, operators, residents) to standardise and further develop survey methods across countries, thereby closing significant data gaps. This data is incorporated into bespoke models to map the interactions between the objectives and developments of the 15-minute city and urban freight transport. This approach enables the transferability of data, tools and knowledge on urban freight transport across European cities and serves as a basis for more holistic planning of 15-minute neighbourhoods.

Aims and objectives

• Investigation of the potential of harmonised data collection, analysis and modelling methods to improve data collection and transferability between European cities
• Identification of the needs of various stakeholders for the evidence-based integration of urban freight transport into the planning of the 15-minute city (concepts, solutions, street design, modes of operation and transport, etc.)
• Modelling of freight demand and traffic generation in exemplary urban neighbourhoods
• Analysis of factors influencing demand for freight transport journeys with regard to transferability
• Assessment of the impacts of measures for sustainable freight transport in the context of the principles of the 15-minute city

© POTUS