Potential improvements for access management in intermodal freight terminals: designing and testing a service for small road haulers

To lower the environmental impact in freight transportation, road haulage activities need to be drastically improved. Road haulage, such as when road haulers access intermodal freight terminals, can be improved by using different access management services. The purpose of this paper is to design an access management service and test it in real-life situations to potentially improve road haulage activities. This case study was conducted through two workshops, one telephone group meeting, three semi-structured interviews, 25 observations and interviews with truck drivers, and 198 hours of time measurements of road haulage activities. The main result is an information exchange framework on which the service is based. It categorises the most relevant information attributes (e.g., container status and queuing status) and provides guidance for how these are exchanged in real time depending on the type of intermodal freight terminal accessed and whether the containers are exported or imported. By exchanging these attributes, which have never been exchanged in real time, the two most significant unnecessary road haulage activities (waiting and administration times) may be reduced and, in turn, lead to reduced environmental impact.