Professor Alan McKinnon:

I will begin by saying something about the previous question on road construction and I will link that to the point that Senator Higgins made about routing. I agree with Dr. Sloman that any future road building should be targeted towards areas where there is a particular problem. Looking at it from a freight standpoint, if trucks get held up on congested roads then there is a big fuel penalty associated with that. Therefore, if there is a severe bottleneck there may be some limited justification for road building.

It seems to me that if we fill the vehicles better we would reduce the amount of vehicle traffic on the road. I do not have the figure for Ireland but in the UK, freight vehicles represent about 7% or 8% of the entire fleet. Cars dominate the flow of traffic. I mentioned digitalisation a few times and the way we can deploy a range of IT tools to help with this. A lot of companies are using this to dynamically reroute their vehicles once they are on the road network to avoid more congested stretches of road, which is allowing us to adapt our freight operations to a road network which is suffering congestion in some areas. I mention the potential to reschedule deliveries into the evening or during the night in order that freight vehicles are able to travel at their most fuel efficient speeds and thereby evade daytime congestion. A lot of work is being done to look at that as well. There are a lot of alternatives to simply expanding road capacity.

If one is looking at the road building option, one must think of the carbon footprinting of the road construction process itself because often when that is factored into the calculation, one discovers that it takes many years to get a carbon payback on simply building more road space. That also relates to the point that was made about the routing of the vehicles. I agree that sometimes drivers these days use GPS and do not realise that it is taking them onto routes that are too small for the vehicle's capacity. I am not sure if this happens in Ireland but we have had lots of examples in the UK of big trucks going onto small rural roads and causing blockages and so forth. We are increasingly talking about smart highways and vehicles and telematic systems. This gives us huge opportunity for tailoring the movement and pattern of freight delivery to the capacity of the road network. Therefore, there is a lot of potential in what Senator Higgins said.

Senator Higgins also asked the question about last mile delivery within urban areas. This is a subject that has greatly interested me for about 20 years. In terms of carbon emissions, is it better for people to shop online or to go to the shops to buy their goods? We did one of the first studies on that comparison way back in 2007 and 2008. We concluded that on balance, if the van delivering the goods to the home was well-loaded, that would have a lower carbon footprint than the person driving to a shop. Once one factors a car shopping trip into the calculation, there is a spike in emissions. It is debatable if one goes by public transport to the shops. On balance, there are things we can do to reduce the carbon intensity of last mile delivery where, for example, people do not get the goods delivered to the home but they go to a locker bank, for example. That has been shown to cut emissions. As online retailing has expanded, the volumes of freight going through the last mile have been increasing and that has been improving the load factors of the vehicles. However, there are some trends heading in the opposite direction. Many of the big online retailers are trying to differentiate themselves by being able to make a rapid delivery overnight or on the same day. When that happens, the vehicles are inevitably less well used.

The load factors decline and the carbon emissions per order delivered increase. That is one worrying trend.

Another trend is the proportion of online retail products that get sent back. As much as 40% or 50% of items of fashion clothing get sent back up the supply chain. That is reducing the relative carbon advantage of using the online channel as opposed to the retail shopping channel. I draw the attention of the committee to some interesting work done by the World Economic Forum and McKinsey about a year ago. They looked at 24 things that can be done to reduce the carbon intensity of online retailing. It included some of the things I have just mentioned, such as locker banks. Other things included switching to electric vehicles and so forth. Combining that range of initiatives would allow us to significantly reduce the carbon emissions from last mile delivery.

The Senator also mentioned procurement. It has a critical role to play. I mentioned earlier that, in logistics, so much freight and warehousing is now outsourced that the big manufacturers and retailers can get leverage on the carbon intensity of those operations through the way they procure those logistics services. There is other work being done these days by, for example, the smart freight centre in the Netherlands, giving companies advice on how they can buy freight services in a way that will minimise carbon emissions. That has been a rather long answer but the Senator raised a range of issues in her question. I thank her.