About the Project
Purpose
The purpose of HITS — Sustainable and Integrated Urban Transport Systems — is to address the city’s logistics challenges from a system perspective and to accelerate the transition to more efficient and sustainable freight transport in urban environments.
The project is now in its third phase, HITS 3. In this continuation, the developed solutions will be further refined to meet the needs and challenges at a system level. The solutions focus specifically on reducing congestion in the city and enabling more efficient and safer deliveries for both society and the business community.
Goals
The main goal of HITS 3 is to further develop, implement, and scale up the solutions tested in previous phases, with the aim of moving toward a long-term and more permanent system transition. The overall goals of HITS 3 are to:
- Further develop, demonstrate, and evaluate sustainable distribution of goods and return flows in the city, where the consolidation of goods leads to increased efficiency of freight transport. This enables the same or larger volumes of goods to be transported into, out of, and within the city area with fewer vehicle movements.
- Further develop, demonstrate, and evaluate secure and safe deliveries, with a focus on loading and unloading, even during off-peak hours, to increase transport efficiency and improve the work environment.
- Further develop, demonstrate, and evaluate the transformation toward a more seamless, sustainable, and flexible goods delivery with interoperable systems and automated loading and unloading, even for unscrewed deliveries.
- Create the conditions for implementing sustainable and efficient solutions in the project’s selected geographical areas, and to understand the potential for scaling and spreading the solutions to other areas.
Background
The project builds upon the concepts and knowledge generated in HITS 1 och HITS 2. In HITS 3, the solutions will be refined by moving from testing activities to large-scale implementation.
The results from HITS 2 show great potential for scaling up off-peak deliveries, consolidation services, and automated processes—and that the synergies between them are significant. However, remaining challenges need to be solved before these can be implemented on a larger scale. The challenges primarily concern finding commercially viable long-term business models as well as digital solutions that minimize manual processes, reduce costs, increase efficiency, and improve safety and security for personnel.
To steer the transport system in a sustainable and desirable direction, the development and implementation of policies and regulations will continue to play a central role. For these policy instruments to have the intended effect, it is crucial to understand how the system's different actors are affected by changed conditions and are given the prerequisites to act based on them.
Therefore, within the framework of HITS 3, the work is being deepened to create a safe and secure environment around vehicles in connection with deliveries, with a special focus on automated loading and unloading. The project will also explore different forms of collaboration, regulatory models, and business arrangements that can enable efficient and coordinated consolidation services.
