Mobility index for urban freight transportation

Abstract This paper proposes a mobility index for urban freight transportation (UFT), with the purpose of subsidizing decisions related to the implementation of actions and measures that may lead to improvements in the mobility level in a certain city area. Mobility indices have been priory proposed for assessing and monitoring the movement of people within city borders, but this topic has been understudied in the context urban freight transportation. Therefore, in order to develop a mobility index for UFT, we carried a literature review to identify the main actions that could be implemented by the government in order to mitigate externalities caused by urban freight transportation. Based on the result of this literature review, a set of indicators to compose an mobility index for freight transportation was proposed. We used the principle of aggregating indicators to formulate the proposed index and, to define the weight of each indicator, we opted to use a multicriteria decision aid method. The proposed index was applied in the city center of Niterói/RJ. The resulting value for the UFT mobility index, in this application, indicates that this area does not have a good mobility level for urban freight transportation, lacking implementing measures to reverse this situation.