City Logistics in Italy: Success Factors and Environmental Performance
This paper describes how the city logistics experience has boomed in Italy in recent years. This is because of the deployment of specific funding programs by the National Government, Regions and other public bodies. The paper describes ten experiments that are called “city logistics systems.” The paper shows how these experiments are active in Italy, with different degrees of success among the public and that there are different paths of acceptance by stakeholders such as shopkeepers, retailers, third party transport operators, etc. The result is a large number of city logistics projects do not correspond to a definition of common success drivers that are defined on the basis of peculiar characteristics of operational and business models. Thus a “national city logistics model” has never been accepted or imposed by law, despite the call for common rules on the access to the city center, loading/unloading time windows, and use of reserved lanes by freight operators. Italian cities have benefited from being “second movers” versus less recent experiences started in various European countries in the Nineties, for example, they have learned from positive and negative lessons of those experiences, being at least more careful in starting city logistics where any possible failure factor was present. The result is that one interrupted case is reported in Italy, and that more practices are active than in Germany. The main city logistics systems active in Italy will be described in this paper, with the aim of gathering the common “success” factors, i.e. the factors that are mainly contributing to reach the city logistics’ main goals, which are the decreasing of air pollution and congestion in the urban environment. Some peculiar characteristics of city logistics systems active in Italy can be defined, which correlate with appropriate performance indicators in order to demonstrate the existence of common success factors (both financial and regulatory) of the experiment. Although those factors have been described ex-post by each city logistics system promoter, an attempt to apply an econometric approach with the aim of measuring on a quantitative basis the importance of a selected number of success factors has never been made. Such an analysis is possible nowadays because of the large amount of data available on the 10 active city logistics systems. The final purpose of the present paper is to investigate the kind of relationship between the “success” of a city logistics system, and the main factors which contributed to it, in order to derive general conclusions on the replicability of a general model. Furthermore, the paper analyzes the results of the appraisal of environmental performance of the “best practice” city logistics case in Italy (Cityporto at Padova), and its contribution to the CO2 reduction. The Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) made after five operating years of the experiment on a city logistics case showed that the environmental benefits generated are valued largely above the public grants employed for the start-up
- Record URL:
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Corporate Authors:
Association for European Transport (AET)
1 Vernon Mews, Vernon Street, West Kensington
London W14 0RL, -
Authors:
- Vaghi, C
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Conference:
- European Transport Conference, 2010
- Location: Glasgow Scotland, United Kingdom
- Date: 2010-10-11 to 2010-10-13
- Publication Date: 2010
Language
- English
Media Info
- Media Type: Web
- Pagination: v.p.
- Monograph Title: European Transport Conference, 2010 Proceedings
Subject/Index Terms
- TRT Terms: Air quality; Benefit cost analysis; Environmental impacts; Freight traffic; Freight transportation; Logistics; Pollutants; Traffic congestion
- Geographic Terms: Italy
- Subject Areas: Environment; Freight Transportation; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning;
Filing Info
- Accession Number: 01351671
- Record Type: Publication
- Files: TRIS
- Created Date: Sep 14 2011 11:12AM