National Freight Model

The UK Freight system is extensive comprising around 195,000 enterprises, 2.5 million employees, and contributing £121 billion gross value added (GVA) to the economy. In most places, LGVs and HGVs contribute ~30% of transport carbon emssions. Every recent major UK study has noted the significant data limitations within freight with the NIC concluding that, as a result, there is "freight blindness" in the planning system.

As a clear symptom of the current inefficiencies, it is thought that around 30% of UK registered HGVs on the UK's roads are "running empty". This is leading to a range of issues such as unnecessary costs, congestion, additional vehicle miles and higher emissions.

The first step in developing any new freight solution is availability of adequate data at an aggregate and disaggregate level. Due to the particular commercial sensitivities of freight, wide-spread data is not available. However, modelling can help fill this gap.

Our project fills this gap by bringing together extensive geospatial data and models from wide range of sources into a fully open National Freight Model available for use by local authorities, consultants, government and the public. The model will be designed such that route/volume/congestion can be explored and segmented through a wide range of categories to aid downstream analysis and application.