Traffic at Intermodal Logistic Hubs

Intermodal logistic hubs attract significant amounts of different types of traffic. Trucks deliver and pick up goods, containers are moved, service and heavy vehicles pass through, and sometimes public roads cross the site. The organic growth of these facilities and the multitude of involved parties frequently result in inefficient and insufficient traffic infrastructure, unnecessary negative environmental impacts, and high costs for stakeholders. For the optimization of infrastructure and the operation of these hubs, many factors need to be known, but often are not. These factors include the requirements of the stakeholders, service times at facilities, origins and destinations of vehicles, and routes and speeds of vehicles. This paper scrutinizes the issues, with the port of Hamburg, Germany, as an example. The focus is the methodology used to analyze the traffic on this intermodal logistic hub, which covers an area of 43 km². More than 120,000 vehicles enter and leave the hub every day. Expert and street side interviews, vehicle tracking, and screen-line traffic counts were combined to answer questions on bottlenecks, emission black spots, and viability of electric vehicles. This combination of traditional and modern survey techniques provides a wealth of information, which allows for improved processes and procedures that lead to increased turnover of goods within the given infrastructure and fewer negative impacts. The paper is particularly relevant to intermodal logistic hubs in Europe, which often have organically grown structures, unlike U.S. hubs, which have more restrictive access.