Freight logistics' contribution to sustainability: Systemic measurement facilitates behavioural change

摘要

Highlights•Self-regulating, triple bottom-line sustainability has fallen short of expectations.•An enabling construct, namely culture, is proposed.•A culture enforcing total cost accountability could induce a supply chain behavioural shift.•This shift is expected to realise returns to freight rail density.•This, in turn, is expected to lower the total national freight bill.AbstractThe freight logistics discipline can make an important contribution to the sustainability debate through the application of its expertise in systemic measurement and trade-off management to the macrologistics realm. The systemic measurement of a country’s freight system allows for the development of decision-making scenarios to,inter alia, inform sustainable transport policy, thereby supporting broader national sustainability goals. The purpose of this research is to test the hypothesis that internalisation of externality costs will encourage efficient supply chain behaviour, which will result in a shift to rail of rail-friendly traffic currently on road. Counterintuitively, the results indicate that increased returns to rail density due to such a modal shift could result in a lower total freight bill (inclusive of externality costs). It also underscores the importance of national freight flow and related cost measurement to enable such analysis.