A stakeholder-based methodology to enhance the success of urban freight transport measures in a multi-level governance context

Urban freight transport (UFT) is fundamental to the liveability of our cities, but it also contributes to the unsustainability of the same cities. Local authorities are primarily responsible for governing urban areas and implement different measures to regulate UFT. Measures often fail as they do not reach their intended goal and sometimes even produce adverse effects. One of the primary causes is that prior to implementation, the different stakeholders affecting and being affected by the UFT are not sufficiently involved. In this study, the multi-actor multi-criteria analysis (MAMCA) is applied ex-ante to evaluate to what extent different measures contribute to the objectives of different stakeholders. A municipality in Belgium, experiencing a lot of traffic, is used as a case study. Regulating UFT is in this case further complicated due to multi-level governance with different jurisdictions over infrastructure. To our knowledge, there are no similar UFT studies in a multi-level governance context. Results show that all proposed measures are an improvement for all stakeholders compared to the current situation. Future implementation of measures in this context is discussed.