Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
are restrictive policies, mainly regulation relating to parking and street access.
In several countries, surveys and data collection activities have been performed,
and some studies give elements of freight transportation analysis and organization
for urban areas. These efforts are aimed at better understanding and quantifying
these phenomena, and represent a first step in the development of a new discipline,
called City Logistics or Urban Logistics by several authors. The main goals of City
Logistics measures and projects are related to reducing congestion and air pollu-
tion rates, without penalizing business activities in city centres.
Several city logistics actions are organized around the concept of the urban
consolidation centre (UCC), defined by Allen et al. ( 2007 )asa logistics facility
situated in relatively close proximity to the geographic area that it serves (be that
a city centre, an entire town or a specific site such as a shopping centre), to which
many logistics companies deliver goods destined for the area, from which con-
solidated deliveries are carried out within that area, in which a range of other
value-added logistics and retail services can be provided. The first UCCs were
private or semi-private initiatives in pursuit of economic and optimization inter-
ests. Later, environmental and social issues incited public administrations to
develop such systems for urban goods distribution (Gonzalez-Feliu 2008 ).
In order to produce a European overview of UCCs we have selected the main
experiments reported in the literature. In Table 1 we present a synthesis of the
relevant experiments.
We can observe that only a few experiments are still operating (about 40 % of
the total), and in many cases they need an important contribution from public
authorities, in terms of both funding and organizational support.
Italy is the country with the largest number of planned and operational UCCs.
Including Sienna's UCC in the latest developments of Cityporto's network of
cities with UCCs, more than 15 UCCs have been planned in all. Most of them
derive from public decisions and have an important contribution from public
authorities regarding both regulation and funding. The main UCCs in Italy are
linked to medium-sized cities, i.e. cities between 100 000 and 500 000 inhabitants,
like Bologna, Genova, Ferrara, Padova, Parma, Sienna, Venezia-Mestre and
Vicenza,. In the last 5 years, other small cities (from 10,000 to 50,000 inhabitants),
Table 1 Synthesis of the
main European experiments
Country
Total number
of UCCs
UCCs operational
in 2010
Italy
16
10
France-Monaco
15
7
United Kingdom
15
3
Germany
13
5
The Netherlands
6
2
Sweden
4
2
Spain-Portugal
3
1
Switzerland
2
0
Greece
1
0
Total
75
30
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