Supply Chains and Urban Logistics Platforms - Sustainable Urban Logistics: Concepts, Methods and Information Systems - page 12

goods at any time (Augereau and Dablanc 2008 ; Durand and Gonzalez-Feliu
2012 ).
• Consumer to consumer: exchanges between individuals are developing. They
will give birth to new needs in terms of logistics at a conurbation, city, district or
neighbourhood scale.
• This heightened need for proximity already made emerge new delivery services
using ''soft modes'', that remind in a way of on-foot delivery men, common in
Europe during a close past, or today's ''Dabbawallahs'', lunch delivery men that
combine train and bike to deliver about 175,000 meals in standardized box to
people in Mumbai (India) each day (Baindur and Macario 2012 ). Services like
''La Tournée'', ''Distripolis'', ''Urbancab'', ''Vert chez vous'', prefigure the
needs of future supply chains, namely to preserve their penetration capacities of
urban centres in capillarity and in capacity.
• Multi and cross-channel purchases: the logistics becomes ''agile'' and ''ubiq-
uitous''. It is quite paradoxical to observe that from one side, the logistics tries to
mobilize more and more sophisticated tools to monitor and synchronize flows of
ever more dispersed information using different channels. And on the other side
the effort is put on dispatching physical flows, resulting from the informational
flows, through the use of technical and human means which main quality is the
consolidated and multimodal penetrative force in ever more difficult places to
reach. Consequently urban logisticians will favour the intermodality, the mix of
means and transport networks.
In the heart of these new devices, the transhipping, considered as the ''sworn
enemy'' of the logistician -synonym of supplementary costs and risks of failure,
thus dysfunctions- becomes an ally. Indeed, the diversity of delivered customers
and their requirements (quantities, hours, units of operation), imply in order to
satisfy them to come closer. Relay spots will become more frequent upstream the
supply chain to interface or even desynchronize the interurban and urban flows.
4 Possible Solutions
The urban goods traffic cannot be considered only as a consequence of a social and
economic organization, it is a particular component of this structure. Local
authorities are more conscious of this fact and many of them are now involved 13 to
control the flows running through the conurbations. Hence, the urban planning
documents (SCOT, PDU, PLU 14 in France) integrate this dimension, noticeably
through a reflection on the localization and dimensions of platforms.
13 This involvement is quite recent and really took consistence around 2000.
14 SCOT : Territorial coherence scheme, PDU : Urban mobility plan, PLU : Local Urbanism
plan.