Financing Urban Logistics Projects - Sustainable Urban Logistics: Concepts, Methods and Information Systems - page 256

card or an on-board unit) and the infrastructure (respectively parking machines and
delivery bays with a reservation system), so public authorities need to invest on it
and users should also pay for the service. When a public interest is found, cities
can invest higher amounts of money. For example, intersection control increases
security for fire brigade, police and ambulance vehicles that need to cross lights
even when they are red, decreasing the number of red light crossings. For that
reason, the city of Helmond promoted the installation of almost 40 systems in key
crossroads of the city. Since such technologies need to evolve and be maintained, a
management company which is also a technological actor is needed. The public-
private collaboration is trivial in that case.
5.3 Logistics Sharing Systems
Last but not least, the collaborative systems among transport carriers seem to be a
valid alternative to UCCs (Gonzalez-Feliu and Salanova 2012 ) that can derive on
an overall cost decrease, having important economic, environmental and social
benefits (see Morana et al. ( 2013 ) of the present topic). This is also the case of e-
commerce distribution sharing systems (Gonzalez-Feliu et al. 2012 ; Wygonik and
Goodchild 2012 ), where synergies can be found among operators to strongly
decrease overall costs of physical distribution. However, stakeholders are reticent
to share (Gonzalez-Feliu and Morana 2011 ), mainly for competition and confi-
dentiality reasons. To deal with that issue, logistics networks seem a good com-
promise, but to develop them, a neutral partner is needed.
It is then necessary to constitute a consortium with the different operators, a
neutral management company and a public authority that ensures the neutrality of
the management operator and the collective utility of the system. The most suit-
able way to make the system work is then to involve the different partner (public
and private stakeholders) at financing levels, in order to make them participate to
the development (but also to the benefit sharing) of the system, ensuring a good
operational management and tactical and strategic development of the logistics
sharing approach.
6 Conclusion
In this chapter we have overviewed the main financing strategies in the context of
urban logistics, translating the main public economics concepts from transport
infrastructure planning to urban logistics deployment. After that, we have simu-
lated several scenarios for financing a delivery space booking system that illustrate
the main concepts and show, through a cost-benefit analysis, the main economic
returns for both public and private stakeholders. We observe that public-private
collaboration can be a good option if both parts share the risks and are disposed to