Solutions

Collaborative last-mile delivery services (zero-emission, shared and crowdsourced) in city centres offer a solution for the on-demand delivery of goods to customers and businesses in a flexible, cost-effective, practical, and sustainable way.

The ULaaDS lighthouse cities are a few of the most cycle-friendly cities in Europe and thus can present the potential of cargo bikes in the most authentic way, as well as for other innovations such as smart lockers, micro-hubs or autonomous vehicles. The economic advantage of cycle-friendly cities for logistics is that congestion levels are much lower.

Three schemes will be tested by ULaaDS within this solution. The first will demonstrate the effectiveness of containerised urban last-mile delivery. Containerisation is key to replacing vans with specialised last-mile delivery vehicles, which in the case of ULaaDS, will be specially designed electric cargo bikes. With the second scheme we will dive into the sharing economy world; ULaaDS partners will test platforms for on-demand city logistics and experiments with various forms of organisation and control of bicycle transport between micro hubs. The third scheme is all about the integrated management of urban logistics. With this scheme, ULaaDS aims at testing a city-wide platform integrating all urban delivery capacities.

In line with recommendations from the European Technology Platform ALICE, the integration and combination of freight and passenger transport resources to optimise existing overall urban transport capacity and create viable and successful business opportunities is a strategic planning principle of ULaaDS.

Inspired by the University of Groningen’s Cargohitching theory, the following schemes aim at designing integrated (people and freight) transport networks and related coordination policies.

Two clear schemes are identified here, the concept of a dual flow hub (shared infrastructure) located in different city environments, working as a horizontal platform bundling transport flows, and on the other hand, multimodality (shared vehicles) to optimise the urban transport network and reduce traffic in the city centres. Both schemes, presented below, will therefore contribute to decreasing environmental and spatial pressures.