The Costs of Urban Freight Transport

Abstract

In Chapter 2 we discussed how the volume and pattern of freight operations is likely to be influenced strongly by the interplay of economic factors. One of the chief of these economic factors is cost. In this chapter, we shall be concerned with the costs of urban freight movement. The costs which will be discussed, however, are not just those which directly influence freight movements (for example, fuel costs), but also those which freight movement itself imposes on urban society and which may not, for a number of reasons, feed back fully as payments to be made by the supplier or the user of the services concerned.