Who’s on our city roads? The unfair focus on parcel delivery neglects other commercial sectors using vehicles on a city’s roads for transport and parking. In fact, there is a lack of studies investigating specifically to what extent parcel delivery impacts and contributes to urban road traffic in major cities worldwide. To examine the true impact of parcel delivery – technically known as CEP for courier, express and parcel deliveries – our team at the Vienna University of Economics in Business was commissioned by the Austrian postal organisation to study the traffic composition in Vienna, Austria, between March and June 2019. Vienna may be very different to Brisbane, but its congestion levels are similar. Credit:Vienna Tourism The goal of the study was to identify the share of parcel delivery and other specific categories of light commercial vehicles used in the city.

The city’s traffic was videoed and manually counted at key times over a 15 week period on main and secondary roads. In addition, we used secondary data from the city of Vienna for validation. The results showed passenger cars accounted for 86.5% of urban road traffic. The remaining share of light and heavy commercial vehicles comprised 13.5% of traffic. Of that, we found parcel delivery vehicles accounted for only 0.8% of the traffic. This clearly contradicts the often-heard and reported claim that they are a main contributor to urban congestion and delays. Other light commercial vehicles played a much more significant part in urban road traffic. Tradesmen and technicians had the largest share among light commercial vehicles with 6.0% of traffic. This is more than seven times higher than the share of parcel delivery.

Any transport policies that aim to deal with traffic reduction should consider all vehicle categories and the respective industry specific logistics. Those tradespeople utes get everywhere. From Austria to Australia Some may argue that European cities differ from Australian cities, but we believe our findings are also relevant to cities here and in other industrialised counties. For example, Vienna is not that different to Brisbane, in Queensland. Vienna is a city with almost 2 million people – similar to Brisbane (depending on how you define the area).

Moreover, Vienna’s traffic is - like Brisbane’s - impacted by a significant share of commuters travelling in and out of the city every business day. Both cities have similar congestion rates – Brisbane 27% and Vienna 25% – and are served by all major local and global parcel delivery companies. But more importantly, the traffic composition in Austria and Australia’s bigger cities seems to be very similar. Researchers in Melbourne measured the share of light commercial vehicles entering the CBD and found 13.4% cent of the vehicles entering the central business district were light commercial and service vehicles. This corresponds almost exactly with our Vienna findings. Congestion is getting worse