Urban freight transport in an Italian mid-sized city: the Bergamo case from inception to stakeholders' involvement

Urban population is steadily growing, bringing along a manifold increment of demand for goods and services, mainly concentrated in relatively limited or overly constrained areas. This is inevitably leading cities around the world to face increasing challenges in terms of efficient transportation of goods, while controlling – and ideally reducing – its negative impacts (i.e. congestion, pollution, noises, accidents…) on the quality of life of their citizens, without penalizing the city’s many economic, social, administrative, cultural, touristic, and other activities (Benjelloun et al., 2010).In this respect, many cities around the world are undertaking city logistics projects (CLP) to address the above mentioned context, with the aim at optimizing the logistics and transport activities by public and private actors in urban areas while considering the traffic environment, the traffic congestion, and energy consumption within the framework of a market economy (Anand et al., 2012). Just to name a few, the experience provided by the Padova City porto project1, the project Annona in Saint-Étienne2, and the LAMILO project inLuxembourg3 are good representatives of the efforts devoted on the topic.In this paper, we illustrate and discuss the main results of a CLP carried out in Bergamo, a mid-size city in the north of Italy, close to the alps and to a major city like Milan. As part of a larger project about smart cities called Bergamo 2.(035) A new Urban Concept in a changing World led by the University of Bergamo, the Bergamo Logistica project aimed to design and develop activities to identify and analyze i) the main issues, ii) the local ongoing projects and initiatives, and iii) the ideal directions of development in a small-medium city. Therefore, in the paper we discuss the main evidences and findings gathered so far through several investigation activities, including literature analysis, workshops and interviews with the main stakeholders. In doing this, we mainly highlight the main issues to address and the main barriers against the development of a city logistics project. Furthermore, as a CLP inherently involves many logistics-related decisions along several dimensions (from the definition of the best place for locating logistics activities such as urban distribution centers, to the last-mile delivery planning and execution, from the organization of limited traffic zones to the deployment of environmentally sustainable fleets of vehicles), we illustrate the Bergamo case study with a particular emphasis on the role of the stakeholders, their involvement in the project, and the resulting initiatives that emerged from a co-creation process involving public authorities and private stakeholder, associations at different levels, research centers and common citizens, among the others (Stathopoulos et al., 2012). At the beginning of the Bergamo Logistica project we identified a number of possible solutions to improve urban freight within the city boundaries and through the city center of a typical mid-size European city, of which Bergamo can be an example for its characteristics(e.g., population, position with respect to other cities) and for the constraints it is subject to (e.g., conformation of historical center, local regulations).As a starting point, we identified some general trends related to the transportation of goods in Bergamo, such as the slow but steady increase of the population in urban areas, the fragmentation of demand both geographically and over time, the diffusion of e-commerce with the related last-mile delivery issues, the relatively high number of small and medium-sized shops in the city center, the request for more flexible and timely delivery lead time, the increase in the frequency of delivery (especially requested by small-shop owner that do not want to keep large inventory stocks), and the increasing number of actors (stakeholders) in the sector. The identification of these trends was based on several sources (ISTAT, Transport White Paper, European Commission documents, extant literature, observations).Subsequently, we revised the main and more recent city logistics solutions proposed both by different Italian actors (in particular, Lombardy Region) and from the literature. According to the Lombardy Region guidelines, we grouped the solutions into four main areas: Access restrictions, Infrastructures, Technology, and Regulations (Table 1). Within these areas, we have identified several unique solution proposals based on what already exists in Europe and in Italy, and based on solutions that have a different level of complexity and may therefore be implemented gradually.