Citizens' perception assessment about urban freight transport

• Ano de defesa: 2023
• Autor(a) principal: João Guilherme da Costa Braga França
• Orientador(a): Leise Kelli de Oliveira
• Banca de defesa: Stanislaw Iwan, Cassiano Augusto Isler
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: eng
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais
• Programa de Pós-Graduação: Programa de Pós-Graduação em Geotecnia e Transportes
• Departamento: ENG - DEPARTAMENTO DE ENGENHARIA TRANSPORTES E GEOTECNIA
• País: Brasil
• Palavras-chave em Português: Urban freight transport; Citizen; Perception; Freight problems; Freight solutions; City logistics; Structural equation modelling
• Link de acesso: http://hdl.handle.net/1843/54652; https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3420-535X

Urban Freight Transport (UFT) is fundamental to citizens' daily lives. Despite its relevance, UFT is responsible for many urban problems like congestion, pollution, and freight vehicle accidents. Aligned with the "city logistics" concept, some measures can be applied to the urban environment to minimise the negative externalities. To promote sustainable UFT and economic development is essential to include UFT in urban and transport planning. To promote UFT insertion in policymaking, this master's thesis aims to analyse the citizens' UFT perception UFT by the research question, "How do citizens perceive urban freight transport?". A Structural Equation Model (SEM) was estimated based on six causal relationships between freight problems, and solutions evaluated the citizen's UFT perception. This study was carried out in different geographic contexts (Global South and Global North), considering two cities: Belo Horizonte (Brazil) and Szczecin (Poland). The results showed that in both cities, while the citizens' perceptions of urban infrastructure problems, urban flow problems, and environmental issues increase, the freight problems perception also increases. Despite this, the cause-and-effect relationships between problems and solutions could only be identified in Belo Horizonte. In this city, as citizens' freight problems perception increases, the perception of city logistics measures involving infrastructure and information system; and Government Actions; also increase. The lack of cause-effect in Szczecin's data analysis was due to a high level of agreement for all the measures investigated, showing that any freight solutions would improve problems. These results imply that citizens homogeneously perceive that freight problems impact cities. Still, the perception contribution of each problem is heterogeneous, varying according to the local context. Likewise, there is heterogeneity in which measures to minimise them are more effective than others, changing according to the local context.