Urban Freight Transport Planning towards Green Goals: Synthetic Environmental Evidence from Tested Results

This paper reviews the ex-post assessment of city logistics measures implemented in some European cities and, in a “what if” framework, proposes an analysis of tested environmental effects which may be useful in defining city logistics scenarios to be evaluated ex ante by simulation models. The analysis is performed in relation to the goals of environmental sustainability to pursue and the main characteristics of the cities in question (i.e., population and density). The paper aims to provide a tool that could be used in an ex-ante assessment methodology to identify a priori which measures (or set of measures) could best work in a specific city with respect to the environmental sustainability goals to pursue. Future scenarios can, thus, be readily defined and subsequently assessed by simulation tools in order to verify whether they meet the planned objectives. Although all measures can produce considerable environmental effects, the study shows that the choice of their implementation should be driven by the type of pollutant to detect.