Priority-based stakeholders analysis in the view of sustainable city logistics: Evidence for Tricity, Poland

Abstract Tricity is a specific area in Poland because of the geographical location, landscape, access to the sea, access to a few container terminals and being an agglomeration. That is why both for inhabitants and local businesses city logistics issues are particularly important. The need for more sustainable transportation and integrative planning processes in cities, has been widely developed since 2013 when Urban Mobility Package set up a concept for SUMP (Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans) Within this idea, EU provides financial support for urban mobility projects. So various city logistics’ solutions are implemented but with a different level of success. City logistics measures have in fact their weaknesses and strengths. It is rather challenging to find an optimal solution because it is difficult to take into account the complexity and diversity of urban logistics while keeping all sides engaged. City logistics seems to be a quite difficult issue, mostly because it contains several levels of complexity. Not only it refers to the diversity of the goods transported and heterogeneity of the transportation means, but also involves multiple stakeholders. The most important are authorities, transportation operator, retailers and residents. These stakeholders most often represent different aims and priorities. While local authorities are interested in reducing pollution, congestion or noise, transportation operators and retailers are mainly focused on keeping costs under control while maintaining service levels. In the study, in-depth interviews technique with various stakeholders of city logistics was used. The interview was based on a questionnaire consisting of open and closed questions. One scale question assessed the importance of a given dimension of sustainable urban logistics for the particular stakeholder. This approach made it possible to identify the priorities of individual stakeholder groups. The respondents were a few individual stakeholders for each group identified within the literature review. To address the aim of the study, to analyse gathered data, both qualitative and quantitative methods were implemented. Among the qualitative methods, the Delphi method, text analysis and text mining techniques were used to identify the main characteristics of stakeholders opinions. Then, to draw the detailed results for each group, the Kruskal-Wallis test was held, equivalent to ANOVA, but not requiring normal distribution of variables, impossible to achieve at small sizes of stakeholder groups samples. The Kruskal-Wallis test allowed identifying similarities and differences between the priorities of the studied groups in light of the research problem being examined.