The Hague kicks-off the activities of its Community of Practice

On December 4^th, 23 stakeholders representing 14 entities, gathered online for the first workshop of the Community of Practice of the Hague’s LEAD Living Lab.

The Community of Practice brings together different stakeholders both from the public and private sectors, including city planners, development and mobility municipality departments, mobility hub providers, logistics, couriers, shared cargo bikes, parcel lockers providers etc.).

The workshop focused on the overall presentation of the LEAD project, partners and its end-game vision. The main goal was to facilitate the discussion of the framework under which these local stakeholders can cooperate with the Dutch Living Lab, considering the starting points as defined by project partners.

The main conclusions of this workshop can be summarised as follows:

• There is a need for connecting services in order to expand competitiveness and improve the impact of logistics, namely:
  • By exploring opportunities of collaboration between companies with complementary service,
  • By primarily considering B2B, B2C. Challenging segments L2L, C2C.
  • By investigating the connection via intermediate platform and connectors
• New issues arise around physical hub operations:
  • Location directly affects the impact of the hubs: Efficiency, Reduction of GHG & congestion
  • Space requirements are stringent for moving, parking and (un)loading,
  • Impacts on the liveability of the surrounding areas should be predicted.
• Infrastructure versus services:
  • Infrastructure can be decoupled from services,
  • Map services requirements in a passenger and freight integrated mobility hub,
  • Need to consider how to connect services (passenger and freight) with different infrastructures.

As a follow-up activity, local partners will schedule bilateral meetings with workshop participants and eventually organise a second workshop, followed by the final pilot design definition. The workshop’s conclusions will directly contribute to LEAD’s Work Package 1: Adaptive City Logistics Framework and LEAD Value Cases. During the last months of 2020 and early weeks of 2021, LEAD is establishing Communities of Practice in each of its Living Labs, and similar workshops are being organised.