Urban Freight Distribution: Urban Supply Chains and Transportation Policies

The chapter moves from the belief that adopting a supply chain approach is crucial to understand how urban freight distribution works and what will be the impact of the various potential urban transport policies on supply chain performance. According to a recent strand of the literature, the chapter aims at (a) characterizing the urban supply chains; (b) discussing how a urban supply chain can be modelled, which role do actors play and how the coordination issue can be handled; (c) showing how transport decisions, in particular whether to use own-account or third-party transport operators, are dealt within each urban supply chain and by each actor; and analysing how urban supply chains are affected by the many proposed freight transport policies. Although much progress has been made in the field, both with regard to modelling and empirical analysis, it is concluded that important progress needs to be made with regard to both the ex-ante and the ex-post evaluation of the private and social efficiency of the different urban supply chains and on how they are impacted by local authorities’ transport policies.