Urban logistics: issues, practices and prospects

The question of urban goods transport emerged in the 1990s in an attempt to limit urban congestion and the environmental impact of goods flows in cities. At that time, the French Ministry of Transport decided to launch the Programme National Marchandises en Ville (PNMV). The aim was to "understand in order to act", and to break away from the implementation of local (and often ineffective) solutions to problems of road occupation, safety and environmental nuisance, without knowing the cause and without a global vision of the city.

The national urban goods surveys were launched to collect the data needed to develop a decision-making tool for local authorities... 30 years after the "people mobility" surveys, which had been used to build traffic assignment models and develop public transport networks. The program financed numerous experiments aimed at reorganizing urban distribution to reduce its impact in terms of road occupation and environmental pollution. In the 2000s, this research found its way into European programs such as COST, BESTUFS and CIVITAS, which made it possible to integrate virtuous practices tested in different member states and to create synergies between researchers. Numerous reports, articles and academic papers in international networks (WCTR, Citylogistics, etc.) have made it possible to widely disseminate understanding of the formation and organization of goods flow management in cities, and above all the interrelationships between planning, urban planning and urban logistics.

When we first began investigating the problem of goods in the city, we were mainly concerned about the scarcity of space and the price of land, which was causing logistics to be squeezed out, conflicts over the use of roads, and more or less effective measures to deal with mobility in the city (for goods and people). However, the digital revolution and technical advances in terms of mobility are making flow management increasingly efficient. They meet the new expectations of consumers and operators, but not without environmental and social consequences.

Twenty years on, these profound changes have enabled the Marchandises en Ville program to be relaunched with a new wave of surveys. This made it possible to assess the relevance of the choices made in 1995 in terms of method and indicators, and to highlight the "invariants" and variables that evolve in line with the new organizations.

This article describes :

• the changing challenges of the city and a sustainable society. These challenges include urban sprawl, new purchasing practices and changes in the transport sector;

• a typology of urban goods flows and management practices, with the aim...