Assessing the magnitude of freight traffic generated by office deliveries

Journal article, 2020

This paper studies the impact of offices on urban freight traffic. Research on freight activity generated by offices is very limited because they are not seen as important contributors to urban freight traffic, and because the amount of deliveries per office is very small compared to the number of deliveries per establishment in freight-intensive sectors (e.g., retail, wholesale, manufacturing). However, the number of offices in cities is so large that altogether they represent a significant share of urban deliveries and generate a nonnegligible share of urban freight traffic. Hence, the relevance of quantifying their freight trip generation. This paper uses the City of Stockholm as a case study. The author collected data from offices and other establishments, estimated regression models and applied them to the city. The results show that offices represent 36% of establishments in Stockholm, 62% of employees and are responsible for 15% of freight trips generated in the city.