Evaluating the use of an urban consolidation centre and electric vehicles in central London

The paper focuses on the role that can be played by urban consolidation centres (UCCs) in reducing freight traffic and its environmental impacts in towns and cities. It is based on the before and after evaluation of a trial led by a major stationery and office supplies company in which urban freight deliveries in central London made from a depot in the suburbs using diesel vehicles were replaced with the use of an urban micro-consolidation centre located in the delivery area together with the use of electrically-assisted cargo tricycles and electric vans. The results show that the total distance travelled and the CO2eq emissions per parcel delivered fell by 20% and 54% respectively as a result of this delivery system. However, the evaluation has also indicated that the distance travelled per parcel rose substantially in the City of London delivery area as a result of the electric vehicles having far smaller load limits in both weight and volume compared with diesel vans. But, at the same time, the trial system was able to virtually eliminate CO2eq emissions per parcel delivered in the City of London. The trial proved successful from the company's perspective in transport, environmental and financial terms. The company therefore decided to continue the operation beyond the end of the trial with it being officially launched during 2010.

Review of UK urban freight studies

Report produced as part of the Green Logistics project (EPSRC and Department for Transport funded). This report is based on a review of UK studies in which data has been collected to obtain an understanding of road-based urban freight transport activities and patterns of operation. Urban freight remains relatively under researched by comparison with passenger transport both in the UK and worldwide. However, in the UK there have been a number of studies that have attempted to investigate road-based freight operations since the 1960s. But no attempt has been made to draw together the results of these various studies and compare them. This is what is presented in this report. The report has studied the results of 30 UK urban freight studies carried out in the last decade in order to attempt to provide insight into urban freight activities in our towns and cities. It presents this current knowledge about urban freight transport activities in the UK from these studies, and compares the similarities and differences between study findings.

Does more cycling mean more diversity in cycling?

In low-cycling countries, cycling is not evenly distributed across genders and age groups. In the UK, men are twice as likely as women to cycle to work and cycling tends to be dominated by younger adults. By contrast, in higher cycling countries and cities, gender differences are low, absent, or in the opposite direction. Such places also lack the UK's steady decline in cycling among those aged over 35 years. Over the past fifteen years some UK local areas have seen increases in cycling. This paper analyses data from the English and Welsh Census 2001 and 2011 to examine whether such increases are associated with greater diversity among cyclists. We find that in areas where cycling has increased, there has been no increase in the representation of females, and a decrease in the representation of older adults. We discuss potential causes and policy implications. Importantly, simply increasing cycling modal share has not proved sufficient to create an inclusive cycling culture. The UK's culturally specific factors limiting female take-up of cycling seem to remain in place, even where cycling has gone up. Creating a mass cycling culture may require deliberately targeting infrastructure and policies towards currently under-represented groups.

Reframing reporting of childhood sexual exploitation: three journalists reflect

This article explores three national and local journalists’ experiences of reporting on child sexual exploitation by so-called “Asian street grooming gangs” in UK towns and cities, with a particular emphasis on journalists framing journalists. In response to coverage of a series of cases, journalists have been accused by academics, policymakers and rival media organizations of fixating on perpetrators’ ethnicity and creating distorted, racist media frames. Few, if any, studies have garnered practitioners’ perspectives on how framing occurs, so we interview three prominent journalists who have covered such cases in order to deepen our understanding of the processes and causative factors behind particular editorial angles. While offering only a snapshot view, our findings reveal these individual journalists to be caught at the nexus of a range of factors that impact upon their work, both internally and externally driven.

BESTUFS policy and research recommendations IV: environmental zones in European cities, accommodating the needs of passenger and freight transport in cities, and BESTUFS Project recommendations

Recommendations report produced as part of the EC-funded BESTUFS project on urban freight transport.

Reducing social and environmental impacts of urban freight transport: a review of some major cities

This paper reviews the options available to policy makers in their efforts to reduce the negative impacts of urban freight transport. After providing a summary of the categories of negative impacts that can be targeted together with the specific policy initiatives available, it reviews the actions taken by policy makers across in cities within four countries (UK, Japan, the Netherlands and France). In the case of the UK and Japan attention is focused on a single city as an exemplar of some of the developments. In the case of the Netherlands and France the discussion is wider.

Utopia and its Discontents: Dreams of Catastrophe and the End of 'the End of History'

The institutionalization of Utopia Studies in the last decade is premised upon a specifically aesthetic reception of Ernst Bloch’s theory of the “utopian impulse” during the 1980s and 1990s. A postmodern uneasiness to both left and right formulations of the "End of History" during this period imposes a resistance to concepts of historical and political closure or totality, resulting in a "Utopianism without Utopia". For all the attractiveness of this pan-utopianism, its failure to consider the relation between historical representation and fulfillment renders it consummate with liberalism as a merely inverted conservatism. In contrast to this specific recuperation of a Bloch, the continuing importance of Walter Benjamin’s theory of the dialectical image and the speculative concept of historical experience which underlies it becomes apparent. The intrusion of the historical Absolute is coded throughout Benjamin’s thought as the eruptive and mortuary figure of catastrophe, which stands as the dialectical counterpart to the utopian wish images of the collective dream. Indeed, the motto under which the Arcades Project was to be constructed derives from Adorno: “Each epoch dreams of itself as annihilated by catastrophe”.