Sustainable Urban Logistics

Planning and Evaluation

Jesus Gonzalez-Feliu

• Publisher: Wiley-ISTE
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781119510482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Urban logistics has been a subject of interest to researchers and practitioners for more than 20 years in France and Europe, and more than 40 in the United States. Nevertheless, the subject remains difficult to address by a lack of unification in the definitions and proposed methods but also by what makes its great richness: the diversity of actors and the pluridisciplinarity of the methods and techniques available.
This book, which synthesizes more than 10 years of personal research on the subject, but also experience within different teams and projects, intends to bring a unified vision (and more and more followed at the international level) on logistics planning Urban development. It begins with an overview of research in urban logistics and then describes and defines the main components: flows, actors, infrastructures, management components, technologies, regulations and financing actions. A unified vision of these elements as well as the definition of sustainable urban logistics is proposed.
Then, the book presents the basics of planning and managing sustainable urban logistics. First, the basics of the before-after analysis are introduced, not only for the experiments but also for the simulation of scenarios. To carry out this type of analysis, two main groups of methods are needed: methods for estimating flows and methods for calculating evaluation indicators. The book presents the main global standards and dominant models for the estimation of the urban freight transport demand, i.e. of freight transport needs in urban areas. Then it presents the methods for estimating and simulating transport and distribution schemes (i.e. transport supply) as well as a proposal for integrated supply-demand modeling. All these methods are presented for immediate application to practitioners, accompanied by summary tables and parameters necessary for their implementation.
As far as evaluation is concerned, the book presents a framework for the choice of sustainable indicators and scorecards. Second, the main methods for economic, environmental, social and accessibility assessment are presented. They are accompanied by tables and figures necessary for their implementation. Finally, the main applications of the proposed methods are introduced. The book is meant to be a practical guide to applying the main methods from scientific research to a practical context, and presents examples of quantified and explained application. It is thus the first book that summarizes and presents the main unified methods to help the different decision-makers to implement them in their actions of planning and management of the urban logistics and the transport of goods in town.

1
Where Are We After 20 Years of Urban Logistics?

1.1. Introduction

The issues regarding the organization of logistics and freight transport in urban areas are not new: the first written document that deals with the regulation for the transport of goods within a city is attributed to Julius Caesar in the 1st Century BC [QUA 08]. In fact, the Lex Iuliana Municipalis (municipal edict) that regulated urban deliveries by establishing night-time delivery schedules in the city of Rome is the oldest example of a law written in the interest of urban stakeholders to solve the nuisances that goods deliveries commonly cause, even in antiquity.

Even though other older civilizations were also interested in the supply of cities (the Greeks, the Phoenicians and the Persians were known to have major commercial activities and cities closely linked to the trade of goods, [GAR 89, TEP 11]), it is ancient Rome, and in particular the Roman Empire, which has provided the oldest and most significant written examples of urban logistics¹. So much so that the Lex Iuliana Municipalis remains as the exclusive record for night-time deliveries in ancient times. The Roman Empire subsequently developed real skills in the organization of supplies for the imperial capital. Indeed, under the rule of Augustus, in the 1st Century AD, an exemplary position was created: the prefect of Annone (Praefectus Annonae). Although a similar role had existed centuries before, its function was of limited duration and only in cases of extreme drought or famine (Tite-Live, Jacques Heugron edition [HEU 70]). This prefect had the vital mission of supplying the city of Rome and managing food stocks, first to alleviate problems pertaining to famine and malnutrition, and second to oversee the proper functioning of the city. In the 1st Century BC, Julius Caesar created the station of ediles cerealis, an office responsible for the supply and management of the grain and cereal stocks of Rome. Augustus, between 8 and 14 AD, reformed this function by bestowing it to an equestrian knight and permanently establishing the Annone prefecture [PET 74], whose primary charge was over grain and cereal supply, which was then extended to include wine and gradually expanded to oversee other foodstuffs. This prefect had both a logistics and spatial planning role [PAV 76], when he decided on, or at least suggested, the construction of the Horrea grain warehouses, grouped in zones according to activity (such as those found in current urban logistics zones), where the planning and management for the supply for grain distribution areas coexisted with the purely operational functions of buying and managing arrivals, stocks, and their distribution to markets and key families [VIR 11, MIM 14]. These Horreas have also been the subject of numerous studies [VIR 87, ARC 11, MIM 14], as well as those affairs between the port of Ostia and the city of Rome, and the transport of food items from the seaport to the distribution warehouses [VIR 15]. This function was also extended to other important cities such as Alexandria [BOW 05], but not to Constantinople, where the municipal organization did not provide for a specialized prefecture to govern over the city’s supply network [PAV 76]. This example is the first documented case of the public management of urban logistics [CHA 60, PAV 76, RIC 80, VIR 95, VIR 00, VIR 07, VIR 11, MIM 14], and yet it still remains relatively unknown to both experts and practitioners².

With the decline of the Roman Empire and the changing of the capital (from Rome to Constantinople), the public functions associated with the cities in the western part of the Empire gradually lost more and more power³. In the Middle Ages, a completely different organization took over. Nevertheless, the supply of cities remained structured [BRI 95]: instead of centralized management, an oligarchic structure, sustained by the guilds of traders and craftsmen of large cities and by the feudal lords in smaller ones, made it possible to ensure the supply and nutrition of populated centers [DES 09]. We also begin to observe the rise of inter-urban logistical organization within Muslim kingdoms (North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula), which allowed cities to both supply and develop the production and trade of goods between those kingdoms [BOO 90, KID 05], and which followed the logic of a “system” or logistical cluster (a concept taken up centuries later, [CED 06, CAP 15]). Nevertheless, actions in the interest of the public, primarily for the development of wharves, the construction or restoration of canals and roads, were necessary for the growth and development of commerce within the city, and as a result, the need for logistics. One of the most illustrative examples is that of the supply of goods for Paris, which were mainly conveyed by river, and whose facilities required supervised enhancement in order to increase both their capacities and efficiencies [NOI 11].

From the Middle Ages up until the 20th Century, the supply of cities was predominantly driven by private stakeholders, first by the guilds and later on by other forms of associations and groups. Procurements made by commercial stakeholders and the associated infrastructure were limited (before the beginning of the 20th Century, the main access routes to cities were via river channels, after which came the railway, Libeskind, [LIB 15]. Major innovations (linked to the increase in the range of products that will not be dealt with here) were achieved through technical advancements (mainly in terms of the vehicles and means of transport) or in terms of infrastructure: improvement of the river courses, the return of urban warehouses during the Renaissance and the Restoration or the invention of the steam engine which stimulated, among other things, rail transport.

The logistics underpinning the supply of Paris oversaw various phases for the development of its waterways [LIB 16]: canals were built in the 17th Century to connect the Loire and the Seine, thereby improving communications between the Atlantic ports and the French capital. In addition, food warehouses were created and developed so as to facilitate long distance (river) and urban (road) transport. The 19th Century saw the rise of rail transportation and the progressive development of urban trams (the first were horse drawn, later upgraded to coal locomotors, and over the course of the 20th Century, replaced with electric locomotors). Although these trams were mainly dedicated to the transport of people, we find many examples where goods were transported by rail (and in some cases tramway) in several European cities [LIB 14].

With urban expansion in the 1950s and the large-scale construction of roads, coupled with a boom in the automotive sector (and subsequently in commercial road vehicles), a new era of urban logistics arrived on the scene: driven by quasi-exclusive private stakeholders who were responding to the market. Indeed, two related phenomena promoted the development of transport and logistics stakeholders: the first is the strong priority given to the transportation of people in the construction and planning of cities, which did not account for the transportation of goods since at that time city planners were not well aware of this sector; the second was access to commercial vehicles, a result of the industrialization of their production, which allowed companies of all sizes to specialize in freight and transport logistics. For those reasons, logistics in cities were left to private stakeholders [CRA 08] and held little interest for public stakeholders [CER 98] who introduced few tangible initiatives, the urban section being considered as the last kilometer of a longer, more organized transport system as a whole [AMB 85]. An emblematic example is the Sogaris-Garonor road freight terminal [DAB 96], which operated in the Paris region between 1967 and 1969 as a true urban consolidation center (the scope of this freight terminal was the Paris and Ile-de-France region, and the services offered were of the same nature as those offered by urban consolidation centers that were to be developed later in the 1990s and 2000s). This consolidation platform evolved into a multi-purpose logistics platform (and later on, the domain of urban logistics) responding to the ever-changing needs of a purely liberal and competitive market.

The 1970s were characterized by the beginnings of scientific works on urban freight transport and the introduction of goods transport in retailing and industrial zones [WAT 75]. Although cities are still developed and organized with the priority of personal mobility, economic activities remain of vital importance to the success of urban areas. An increase in the urban population indirectly leads to an increase in the flows of goods for the supply of cities. This is reflected in the United States and Japan where roads and parking facilities in the retail and industrial areas of some cities are extremely overcrowded, accounting for the rise in scientists and practitioners who began to address the quantification and qualification of goods transport within urban areas [DEM 74, WAT 75, MAE 79], predominantly in the context of North America. Those works correspond more to the needs of private stakeholders (industrialists, traders, transport companies, etc.) than to those of public stakeholders. Those works being pioneered by the United States [OGD 92, HOL 12] remained largely unknown in France. This is partly due to the fact that in France at that time, priority was given to the urban transport of people. It was only later in the 1990s that public authorities began to really take an interest in the transportation of goods [AMB 99a].

In Europe, the first actions in terms of the promotion of urban logistics instigated by public authorities were to combat the rise in congestion that worsened throughout the 1980s. However, public awareness for the need to act in a coordinated way so as to alleviate inconveniences and mitigate problems originating from urban freight transport and urban logistics shortfalls only became widespread in the 1990s. Indeed, the first actions by public authorities in the 1980s were regulatory and temporary in nature, mainly in the form of access regulations or parking restrictions that were implemented locally by the municipality and without much coordination or a desire for unification at the regional or national level [DAB 98, GON 08, MAG 07, SPI 08].

It was only in the 1990s that major concepts supporting urban logistics were developed and the notion of urban freight transport was approached by various countries somewhat differently, but which nevertheless had many parallels [COS 98, ECM 99] with Germany, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Switzerland being the more active of the European countries. Several authors state that the concept of urban logistics used today on an international scale can be derived from its German namesake city-logistik, according to Thoma [THO 94], often further citing the works of Ruske [RUS 94] and Kohler [KOH 97] as pioneers in the field. Nevertheless, in addition to the report by Thoma [THO 94], there is a previous record for the use of the term “city logistics”: that of McKinnon [MCK 91], who used it during a seminar dedicated to urban logistics. However, it was only at the International City Logistics Conference, through Eiichi Taniguchi, that this term became popular, and where at the same time, one of the three predominant definitions was presented as well [TAN 01].

Furthermore, coordinated actions (initiated by public and/or private stakeholders) were being amplified in Europe, mainly in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and Switzerland [ROS 05]. However, the involvement of public stakeholders was not homogeneous throughout Europe. Indeed, while in France, the national awareness allowed for the development of the national program “Marchandises en Ville” (Goods in the City), which started in 1993 [DUF 99, GON 12g], Germany and the United Kingdom adopted a completely different path: one where urban logistic actions in those countries were primarily carried out by private stakeholders, with little or no financial support from public stakeholders, and where regulations regarding urban freight transport remain neutral [GON 08]. The Netherlands, on the other hand, adopted a hybrid path, where a strong initiative from private stakeholders is being regulated and administered by local and regional public stakeholders to reward and encourage good practices [COS 98]. Other countries, such as Spain and Italy only became aware of the necessity and challenges regarding urban logistics in the early 2000s. Northern countries adopted a similar logic to that of Germany and the United Kingdom at the end of the 2000s. Central and eastern European countries began to focus on urban logistics issues in the mid-2000s, a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Preface
• 1 Where Are We After 20 Years of Urban Logistics?
• 2 A Unified Definition of Sustainable Urban Logistics
• 3 The Evaluation, Assessment and Analysis of Scenarios as Decision-Making Tools
• 4 Estimating Inter-establishment Flows
• 5 The Estimation of Other Urban Freight Transport Flows
• 6 Estimating and Modeling Change in Urban Logistics
• 7 Indicators and Dashboards for the Evaluation of Sustainable Urban Logistics
• 8 Estimating the Impact of Sustainable Urban Logistics
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• End User License Agreement