Lisbon’s Establishment-based Freight Survey: revealing retail establishments’ characteristics, goods ordering and delivery processes

Introduction Establishment-based freight surveys (EBFS) are a specific data collection process for urban freight operations. The focus of both this research, and of the data collection process, was to investigate vehicle activity at urban retail establishments. This work reports on the formulation, development, application and statistical analysis of an EBFS with a sample of 604 establishments in Lisbon, Portugal. It contributes towards the systematization of the available knowledge and aims to potentially support the process of developing future EBFS as well as to inform researchers and policy-makers of establishments characteristics and delivery patterns. Methods Several statistical analyses were performed to the survey answers’ distributions such as Spearman correlations, line / scatter plots and Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) linear regressions. Results New insights into variables’ worth are provided, such as the influence of industry category on the vehicle arrivals throughout the day or the influence of the number of employees on the total of weekly deliveries. It is revealed that modeling freight trip generation might be prone to considerable errors, which has implications if EBFS data is to be used in simulation models to test policy alternatives. Conclusions It is concluded that stricter parking policies should be in place to avoid obstruction-causing parking practices. Also, the results support advising further research in the field of load consolidation and on the effect of the ordering process in the total trips generated by a retail establishment.