Contribution of Best Practices to Promote Sustainable Urban Freight Transport

Abstract

Urban logistics decision makers face serious challenges in trying to make urban freight transport (UFT) efficient and sustainable. Therefore, it is necessary to identify best practices (BPs) to promote improvements on activity levels, modal shifts to lower-carbon transport systems, lowering energy and intensity, and reducing fuel carbon intensity. This paper conducts an exhaustive literature review that seeks to identify that are directly applicable to BPs promoting sustainable UFT and that indicate the opportunities and challenges of urban logistics. The results indicate that, although BPs make sense for themselves, the most powerful effect occurs when two or more of them are used together, multiplying their strengths. Furthermore, there is an expressive participation of environmental and economic indicators (costs and service levels) to the detriment of social indicators, thus indicating a literary gap.