Financing Urban Logistics Projects - Sustainable Urban Logistics: Concepts, Methods and Information Systems - page 244

important to quantify the socio-economic benefits: impacts on congestion, social
benefits (mainly to delivery workers and private car drivers related to the decrease
of double line parking) and economic benefits for carriers (mainly related to global
time savings). Because the socio-economic benefits are higher than the destroyed
resources, the development of delivery bays is justified.
Another case of collective utility is that of Bologna (Italy), where the city centre
has rigorous restrictions but presents also parking facilities to ''clean freight
transport vehicles'' (Trentini et al. 2012 ). In that case, vehicles have to be iden-
tified (mainly by RFID) and automatic control devices are installed at the ''gates''
of the limited traffic zone. Those investments are not refunded back, because they
are of collective utility (the decongestion of the city centre due to such controls, on
both private cars and business/goods vehicles led to significant socio-economic
savings). However, they have been financed by different public bodies: the city, a
regional contribution and a national subsidy.
3.2 User's Refunding
The user's refunding strategy is that of making the user (in this case the transport
carriers, the retailers or the freight senders) for using the service, i.e. to pay a fee
for using an urban logistics service. This strategy is mainly motivated for
economic reasons and the systems in this category need to be economically viable.
This is the case of German UCCs, most of them stopped when carriers found less
costly delivery schemes. Indeed, in Germany, consolidation has followed an
economic logic, and carriers adopting such schemes have done only because they
allowed economic savings. The main example is the Postdamer Platz distribution
centre of Berlin, which is still operational. Another example is that of Dresde's
cargo-tram, developed for private interests of a Volkswagen manufacturing plant.
The system, which was an example of user's refunding, stopped in 2010 because
considered as less rentable that a classical truck-based delivery system due to the
global economic situation.
An alternative is to use refunding mechanism applied to a larger set of indi-
viduals (urban tolls, negotiable permits, etc.) to make the less virtuous pay for the
virtuous delivery system. This alternative, although envisaged for delivery space
booking services, has not been adopted by the city of Bilbao (Spain) because of
both cultural and legal issues.
3.3 Mixed Approaches
In urban logistics, the main re-funding approaches are mixed because of a common
factor of most projects: investment costs are difficult to be entirely refunded. For
that reason, public authorities accept to partially finance them, then to make them