Financing Urban Logistics Projects - Sustainable Urban Logistics: Concepts, Methods and Information Systems - page 250

Table 4 Benefit monetary conversion, for each savings category
Type of gain Stakeholder Economic gain per vehicle (€/year)

Vehicle usage Transport operator 0

Time savings Transport operator 350

Fuel savings Transport operator 85

CO 2 reduction Transport operator 15

Total savings Transport operator 450

1175€/truck each year (for trucks making urban distribution as those of DSB
pilot). On the another hand, the direct benefits are small since the gain of CO 2
and the current carbon prices give an average gain of 16€/truck each year.

The benefit table for the transport carrier is reported in Table 4 .
With these assumptions, after year 5 and that each transport carrier would have
an average benefit of 450€/vehicle each year, mainly due to the congestion
reduction (which is traduced into time savings). However, it is important to take
into account margins. Since the main impacts are related to time savings because
of congestion reduction and traffic estimations have in general errors of 20-30 %,
a 25 % margin seems reasonable. We set then the maximum fee that can be asked
to transport carriers to 360€ per vehicle and year, including VAT.

4.4 Collective Benefits

After defining individual benefits for transport carriers, it is important to define the
collective benefits in order to estimate the interest of municipal authorities on
investing on such systems. Some of those benefits derive from those of transport
carriers but others have to be estimated by taking into account global traffic on the
DSB influence areas. The main benefits that have been identified are:

• Time savings of drivers (both for personal or commercial trips), which can be
translated into economic gains (money savings related to timetabling and
working hours). However, since it is difficult to make this estimation, we assume
an average cost of time according to World Bank ( 2005 ) for monetary value
estimation of travel time.
• Distance savings, indirectly translated into economic gains (money savings
related to vehicle usage) are as for transport carriers savings, negligible.
• CO 2 savings, which can be related to economic gains if a Carbon Tax is
assumed. The estimation method is similar to that of heavy vehicles, using an
estimation of the current distribution of vehicle types on the considered city and
translating it to the traffic in the parts of the city where we supposed to have
DSB systems operationally working.