Investigating Commercial Vehicles’ Parking Habits in Urban Areas: The Case of Thessaloniki, Greece

The COVID-19 pandemic changed the way modern societies are organized and perform in so many ways. Inevitably, Urban Road Freight Transport (URFT) has also been affected by the pandemic in many ways. For example, e-commerce has increased over the last 3 years compared to the traditional shopping ways that required the physical presence of the buyers at the retail shops; last mile delivery has changed due to the necessity of mobilizing environmentally friendly vehicles and abandoning gradually vehicles with internal combustion engines, etc. Despite the above, URFT still requires specially designed areas and facilities for its activities to be undertaken. Such areas are the parking spaces dedicated to be used only by commercial vehicles (VCs) in order to perform loading and unloading activities. This necessity seems not only to be constant but also to be on the increase. At the city of Thessaloniki, Greece, our research team has, over the last 14 years, been periodically monitoring these parking spaces in terms of their evolution concerning their number and location as well as their level of usage. The present paper presents the evolution of the number, location, and level of usage of the abovementioned parking spaces to become a useful tool for the local decision-makers (municipal authorities). The issue of determining the locations of these loading and unloading parking spaces for commercial vehicles must be based on scientific data and the true needs of the URFT’s stakeholders. After all, public space in urban areas decreases year after year. It is important and almost self-evident that the way the available public space is used should maximize society’s benefit. In this framework, the current paper presents the key findings of this evolution in the city of Thessaloniki, enumerating proposals on how to achieve maximum usage of the parking spaces without affecting the URFT’s level of performance.