No abstract

No abstract

Urban freight transport is increasingly difficult to organize and manage: the demographic expansion of cities, the environmental issues, new logistical trends, scarcity of space and the evolving consumer habits are just some of the challenges. In most cities, road transportation is essentially the only mode used for performing urban distribution of goods. Inland navigation is used solely for transport of bulk materials over long distances bulk material (e.g. construction material and agricultural products). However, experiences in several European cities have demonstrated that the use of inland waterways can be a viable alternative for smaller-scale freight transport in urban areas. This present article aims at reviewing current experiences in the field of inland navigation for city logistics. Through the analysis of several implementation cases in Europe, we demonstrate that inland navigation can be used for various segments of the urban freight transport, including transportation of palletized goods (e.g. construction and industrial material), transportation of containerized goods (e.g. for the supply of the supermarkets), deliveries to local shops and restaurants, deliveries of parcels, transport of waste and recycled material and service trips. Furthermore, the article analyses the conditions in which these transport schemes were developed, highlights their key success factors, and investigates the particular role of local public authorities in organizing and managing these innovative transport schemes.

No abstract

The use of cargo cycles for last-mile parcel distribution requires urban micro-consolidation centers (UMC). We develop an approach to localize suitable locations for UMCs with the consideration of three criteria: demand, land use, and type of road. The analysis considers metric levels (demand), linguistic levels (land use), and cardinal levels (type of road). The land-use category is divided into commercial, residential, mixed commercial and residential, and others. The type of road category is divided into bicycle road, pedestrian zone, oneway road, and traffic-calmed road. The approach is a hybrid multi-criteria analysis combining an Analytical Hierarchical Process (AHP) and PROMETHEE methods. We apply the approach to the city center of Stuttgart in Germany, using real demand data provided by a large logistics service provider. We compared different scenarios weighting the criteria differently with DART software. The different weight allocation results in different numbers of required UMCs and slightly different locations. This research was able to develop, implement, and successfully apply the proposed approach. In subsequent steps, stakeholders such as logistics companies and cities should be involved at all levels of this approach to validate the selected criteria and depict the “weight” of each criterion.

No abstract

No abstract

The automotive industry is one of the largest polluters, affecting air quality in urban areas. For this reason, the effect of the public policies on the sector is very important in economic and social terms. In this sense, one of the policies has been the subsidies for efficient vehicles where the plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) are included. Subsidies are very important for some of these vehicles, with a real price which is not competitive in comparison with internal combustion (IC) cars. As an example, the sales have dropped in Denmark in 2016 after the incentive reduction.However, in some cases, policies designed to regulate the situation can create some perverse effects due to the complexity of this issue.This type of vehicle is powered by an IC engine in combination with one or more electric motors using energy stored in battery packs. The real efficiency of this kind of vehicle depends strongly on the responsibility of the owner. Only if the car has been plugged in, their batteries have been fully charged and also the car is driven under "efficient mode", the emissions will reduce significantly.Considering the fuel consumption gap between manufacturer declaration and real drive test and the emissions in different pollutants of the PHEVs in comparison with IC cars, the aim of this article is to show a new possible perverse effect generated by them. This has happened recently with diesel cars, favoured by policies focused in CO 2 emission, generating NO x high level in the urban area air quality.Finally, we highlight the main result and conclude emission cost implemented in fuel tax as 'the first best' in environmental policies.