Assessing City Logistics projects: a business-oriented approach

The rising urbanization and the consequent increasing pressure on efficient urban freight distribution activities have laid the ground for a set of City Logistics (CL) initiatives addressing the negative externalities generated by goods transportation, such as pollution, traffic congestion, and inefficient use of infrastructures. Although several CL pilot projects have been developed, and some initiatives have succeeded in generating benefits for the stakeholders involved, both public and private stakeholders are often still unsure when it comes to launching new initiatives because they are unable to foresee the long-term economic and financial sustainability of such projects. However, these issues are seldom addressed. In fact, only recently researchers and practitioners have started to elaborate methodologies aimed at assessing the economic viability of CL initiatives. The present work contributes to this research stream by developing a business model framework for the assessment of CL projects. To this end, an existing business model framework has been adapted to the context at issue by modifying its components via a desk research based on existing literature and a number of international projects. The developed framework constitutes a tool to comprehensively capture all the elements of a CL business model. Therefore, it can be applied to analyse success and failure factors of existing projects, in order to provide recommendations about the feasibility and longterm sustainability of future CL initiatives.