Abstract
Existing city logistics infrastructures (loading bays, parking spaces, roads etc.) are often not suitably planned to satisfy the growing demand for goods and therefore suf-fer from recurrent congestion. Such congestion impacts urban lifestyles and economies, producing major externalities to businesses and to society. The current study focuses on freight vehicles congestion in large urban establishments (e.g. shopping malls) and explores the potential of urban consolidation policy and parking regulations as a pos-sible solutions. A central planner faces three main problems when implementing a policy: (A) to quantify the externalities to be addressed by the policy; (B) to determine ex-ante the behavioural responses of the agents involved to the system changes brought about by the policy; (C) to assess the overall policy impact on the economy and the environment. We address these issues in the context of a city planner looking for solutions that could reduce the externalities due to freight traffic in busy metropolitan areas without negatively impacting the city economy. We approach issue (A) through a case study: we have collected detailed data at the level of individual commercial vehicle arrivals to large urban retail malls in Singapore and identified several system performance metrics to assess the impact of commercial vehicle activities in areas surrounding these large freight traffic generators. To address issue (B) we formulate and estimate a set of econometric models describ-ing the parking choice and duration behaviours of commercial vehicle drivers. From these models we derived several behavioural indicators including: the willingness to pay for parking, the attitude towards illegal parking and the effect of the parking fine, the queueing behaviour and the freight value of time. Issue (C) is addressed by implementing the above derived models within a simula-tion platform. We then simulate and tested the impact of different parking regulations and consolidation policies on the mean cost of delivery, the amount of CO2 produced, the road and parking congestion and the demand for different parking facilities.