City characteristics and logistics measures: synthetic evidences to a pre-guideline in Europe

Today, there is a worldwide focus on setting up a Sustainable Development Strategy to identify and define measures to achieve a continuous long-term improvement in quality of life by creating sustainable communities able to manage and use resources efficiently and effectively, use the ecological and social innovation potential of the economy and, in the end, ensure prosperity, environmental protection and social cohesion. In this context, great importance assumes the urban transport and, in particular, the freight transport. The urban freight transportation impacts can be reduced by implementing different city logistics measures but we need to verify if they strongly penalize the city centres and the commercial activities located there. All the implementable city logistics measures have to point out the impacts generated on the existing distribution schemes used by the urban commercial activities. However, in this context, the paper, within the field of city logistics sustainability, recalls the overview of measures to be implemented, in a “what if” framework, with strong references to the ex-post assessment carried out in order to support the definition of city logistics scenarios that should have to be evaluated ex-ante by simulation models. The analysis is done in relation to the goals of environmental sustainability to be pursued and the main characteristics of analyzed cities (e.g. population, density). The paper would want to provide a pre-guideline that could be used in an ex-ante assessment methodology in order to identify which measure (or set of measures) works better in a specific city in relation to the goals of environmental sustainability to be pursued.