A freight transport plan will be unveiled this summer in a bid to help the delivery industry shed what ~Transport for London~ describes as its ‘necessary evil’ label.
The document was being finalised as Surveyor went to press and is due to be launched following the local elections in May. The plan will be one of the first major initiatives taken forward by new transport commissioner, Peter Hendy, and will aim to secure a new, better-co-ordinated approach to catering for freight deliveries. It will replace a previous attempt, the London sustainable development partnership, which Hendy described at last week’s freight summit as merely a ‘talking shop’.
Hendy told freight operators at the summit last week: ‘London is growing unlike any other European city. I want to improve freight’s reliability, performance and best practice.’ The plan will identify hotspots where freight vehicles are receiving a large number of fixed-penalty notices in the course of making deliveries, and propose remedies. These are likely to include improving the training of parking attendants, so they offer a ‘fairer’ approach. A trial scheme where freight operators were given a pager which could only be called by attendants to check if they were genuinely on a delivery was abandoned because of the high turnover of attendants – which led to ~Transport for London~ refocusing on training. The strategy could also see the creation of a construction consolidation centre in southeast London to reduce the number of deliveries to building sites in the city.
The centre, in Millwall, has been used in the construction of Heathrow’s Terminal Five and Wembley Stadium, and is due to be officially opened next week. TfL will also look at increasing the use of London’s canal network. With ‘modest investment’, it could remove many heavy vehicle trips from the roads by promoting, in north London, a waste-collection site where vans can drop off rubbish, cutting the length of routes and number of trips. The waste is then transported down the river. This has been achieved with the use of waste-collection vehicles which allow both collection of waste and transfer to barges.
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