Review of good practices in urban freight transportation and benchmarking city logistics schemes

Abstract

Urban Freight Transport is a vital activity and has a major economic role. Unfortunately, the efficiency of the urban freight system is hampered by urban distribution issues such as congestion, regulatory measures, noise pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, and so on. Hence the need for actions and good practices for the management of urban freight transport. These actions deal with the management of goods deliveries as well as return flows. Urban logistics solutions are diverse and concern the storage and organization of urban transport. Urban warehousing actions are divided into four categories. The Urban Consolidation Centers (UCC), a kind of mutualization platform located on the outskirts of the city center. Proximity Logistics Spaces (PLS) which are small platforms that allow a temporary storage of goods and have clean vehicles ensuring the last meters. Afterwards the Veh]icle Reception Points (VRP) where city center's actors offer a storage capacity of their own store and it is the consumer who moves for recovering its packages, and finally the Urban Logistics Boxes (ULB) which are mobile or fixed structures located at a street level, which allow temporary storage of goods. These Urban Logistics Spaces lead to the improvement of the flow of goods by favoring clean vehicles. The objective of this article is to study the different solutions of urban logistics, based on the literature, to make a comparative study of the development of urban logistics solutions in emerging cities comparable to Casablanca, to synthesize the experiments implemented by these cities and thus to lead an investigation on different urban solutions in a national context.