Financing Urban Logistics Projects - Sustainable Urban Logistics: Concepts, Methods and Information Systems - page 243

being in direct conflict. However, a third family of approaches that mix both
precedent families have been observed in the last years, mainly in transport
infrastructures (Bonnafous et al. 2006 ) but also in urban logistics projects (Browne
et al. 2004 ). This family includes all mixed approaches where a part of the
investments are covered (or refunded) by public authorities on the basis of col-
lective utility and the rest must be obtained by the economic benefits of the
systems, paid by its direct users or their customers. In this section we will examine
all three families of approaches, illustrating them by representative examples in
urban logistics.
3.1 Collective Utility
By collective utility we intend the socio-economic interest that a project can bring
to a society. In collective utility viewpoints, the initial investments and operational
costs are paid by public authorities. The funds come from the public taxes, either
local or national, and in general no refunding is allowed. In some cases, it can be
asked to a private partner to invest a part (in case of PPPs) with a total refunding by
public funds, although this case is less common. Collective utility is motivating the
construction of free infrastructures, like national and regional public roads, public
parking (with no fees) or, regarding urban logistics, delivery bays or electronic
accesses to limited traffic areas. To justify public utility, a system must be proven
socio-economically viable. In other works, it must prove to bring a quantifiable
socio-economic benefit to the collectives of the city or country it is deployed.
The decision to invest is then conditioned to a quantifiable analysis of the balance
between the used (and sometimes destroyed) resources and the created richnesses,
which are advantages of different nature (economic, environmental, cultural, social,
societal, etc.) directly or indirectly lead by the project (Bonnafous et al. 2006 ). To do
this analysis, a socio-economic assessment via Cost Benefit Analysis is a valid
alternative, as seen in infrastructure investment (Hayashi and Morisugi 2000 ).
To make a first example related to urban logistics, we will cite the deployment
of delivery bays and other free parking infrastructures for trucks in urban centres,
common to several European cities. 1 Indeed, delivery bays in city centres are in
general located next to fee-based parking spaces (so no free parking zones) and
their deployment imply two types of resource usage: one is that of real costs, both
for its construction (signalling, painting and sometimes small civil works) or for
enforcement controls (sometimes assimilated to car parking controls); the second
is the lack of savings that suppose blocking private car parking economic benefits
to make a delivery free parking space. To justify that resource usage, it is
1 The following statements are made after a quantitative and a qualitative analyses of two
delivery bay and road parking behaviour surveys (one in Bilbao, Spain and one in Lyon, France)
made between 2011 and 2012 in the context of the FREILOT project. For a detailed description
of the surveys and their main results, see Blanco et al. ( 2012 ).