Urban logistics

In no other area of logistics is the challenge of completing a required transport task with the minimum number of vehicles and journeys as pressing as in the supply of large cities and conurbations.

Focus on urban logistics

The reasons for urban logistics are obvious: historically, transport infrastructure has not kept pace with population growth and motorisation. More intelligent use of existing transport systems is needed, because nowhere are external costs as high and directly felt as in urban areas.

Urban logistics and cooperation

Collaboration is a key word in city logistics: Co-operation can be used to minimise the number of delivery trips required by combining the trips of several service providers.

Parcel delivery services are a classic example: as long as each service provider optimises itself individually, we will continue to see five vehicles from five different delivery services stopping in a row on the same street, some of them delivering their parcels to the same recipients.

Danger of redundancy in urban logistics

The overall optimum for a city must not be further reduced by redundancy. The larger the metropolitan area, the higher the social marginal costs of additional or avoidable delivery trips. Whereas efficiency gains on the “last mile” are just “nice to have” for small to medium-sized cities, they are of existential importance for large metropolises.

ORGAPLAN Logistik‘s logistics consultants will help you understand the challenges of urban logistics:

Urban logistics: logistics in urban areas

The face of our cities has changed dramatically in recent times. Cities cover only one per cent of the earth’s surface but consume 75 per cent of the energy used. More than half of the world’s population already lives in cities. Residents feel a tangible loss of quality of life. For city logistics, this not only raises logistical questions about the movement of goods within cities. Large cities require massive supplies of energy, food and water, sometimes from distant areas. This increases transport intensity.

There is competition for the use of infrastructure between private users and inner city commercial traffic. This, in turn, reduces the productivity of the latter in a way that generates high external costs, to the detriment of all city dwellers. Such self-reinforcing processes give urban logistics an added dimension. If it works, it should help to break such a vicious circle.

Compression effects in urban logistics

Three additive compression effects can be distinguished:

• Tour Compression: Increasing the number of stops within a delivery tour while reducing the distance between stops.
• Shipment consolidation: Increasing the number of shipments delivered per consignee. In addition to reducing the number of stops, consolidation can reduce the unloading time per shipment and increase the vehicle turnaround time.
• Load smoothing: Cross-company shipment consolidation creates pooling effects (load peaks and troughs that balance each other out), resulting in a higher average initial load per trip.

Specific benefits of forming partnerships:

Aspects of city logistics	ORGAPLAN Logistik GmbH range of services
1. partner finding	Evaluation of the market for suitable partnerships (industry, product range, structures) Selection of service providers
2. Location(s), Outskirts	Determination of the optimum number of distribution locations Determining the optimal location Determination of capacities and technology
3. Joint Delivery	Route planning Vehicle concept Cost breakdown per cooperation partner

How urban logistics works

Deconcentration and consolidation: Basically, every truck that doesn’t have to go into or through a city is an asset. Very few hauliers have city logistics vehicles with hybrid, biodiesel or electric engines that could pay for themselves if they were used in a cooperative.

The basic logic of city logistics is similar to that of the CEP sector: there are several receiving terminals for national groupage networks or multichannel networks in the city area – networks that receive shipments in the weight range between 50 kg and 1.5 t for local distribution in the early morning from other domestic or foreign regions as part of “main runs” driven at night. After unloading, these consignments are distributed to regional routes, with only part of the incoming goods usually destined for recipients in the city.

In medium-sized cities, the hub is often also responsible for serving a larger region around the city. As a result, a city logistics consolidation centre that may need to be set up cannot be approached directly by incoming long-distance vehicles due to a lack of volume – unless the network operator also transfers the supply of the surrounding area to the city terminal.

In urban distribution, it is rare for a consignee to receive consignments from several consignors on the same day. In this case, the consignments destined for the city area are consolidated by two partners, who hand over their respective consignments to the third partner for local distribution by another (inner-city) means of transport.

A neutral local urban logistics service provider could also be considered, which would alleviate the ever-present fear of misuse of sensitive customer data.