Logistics Sprawl and Urban Freight Planning Issues in a Major Gateway City - Sustainable Urban Logistics: Concepts, Methods and Information Systems - page 51

The new distribution centers required by the current organization of supply
chains and a consumer-based economy are directly responsible for logistics
sprawl, i.e. the tendency for warehouses to move from urban to suburban and
exurban areas (Dablanc and Ross 2012 ). In metropolitan areas, logistics sprawl has
been the dominant spatial pattern for many years. Historically, warehouses and
freight terminals have tended to be close to city centers and rail stations (Chinitz
1960 ). Today, they need more space and are located as close as possible to
highway networks and airports Dablanc ( 2007 ). Woudsma et al. ( 2008 ) have
shown the importance of accessibility to highway nodes and airports when
selecting the location of a logistics facility. Suburban and exurban areas are
attractive because of the availability and low cost of land and also because it is
possible to connect to a more complex system of regional and national flows from
suburban areas. This generates economies of scale for the logistics industry but has
an impact on urban landscapes. Logistics sprawl contributes significantly to the
unsustainable nature of large metropolitan areas by generating congestion, CO 2
emissions and local atmospheric pollution. These impacts are the result of addi-
tional vehicle-miles travelled (VMT) generated by the changes in the location of
freight terminals and the increase in distances travelled by trucks and vans to
deliver commodities to urban areas where jobs and households remain concen-
trated. Dablanc and Rakotonarivo ( 2010 ) calculate that cross-dock terminals 2 for
parcel and express transport companies moved an average of 6 miles further away
from the center of Paris between 1975 and 2008. During the same period, jobs in
general moved only 1.3 miles, meaning that logistics sprawl is much more pre-
valent than the general sprawl of economic activities in metropolitan areas. They
estimated the net increase in annual CO 2 emissions resulting from the relocation of
facilities serving the Paris region to be 16,500 tonnes in 2008 compared with 1974.
The issue of logistics sprawl has recently generated some discussion among
scholars, particularly economic geographers. ''It is the availability of huge parcels
of cheap land that drove the emergence of exurban logistics hot spots at the
beginning of this decade'' (Christopherson and Belzer 2009 , pp. 212-213). Cidell
( 2010 ) has shown that in 47 of the 50 large metropolitan areas she surveyed,
''decentralization'' of freight activity had occurred over the last 20 years
(1986-2005), as measured via Gini coefficients. Because data were aggregated at
county level, however, it was difficult to account for some of the relocation pat-
terns, as central counties can be large and locational changes within counties were
not covered in Cidell's study. I will address this issue in Sect. 3 by looking at data
for Los Angeles at the sub-county (zip-code) level.
Bowen ( 2008 ) used the County Business Patterns for 1998 and 2005 to show
the changing geography of warehousing in the U.S. He confirms that these
activities have experienced enormous, largely unnoticed, growth in recent years.
''Almost no other industry that employs so many people has grown as fast as the
2 Cross-dock facilities are the terminals used in the parcel (less than truck load) and express
transport industries.