Our Vision
Cities suffer from too much traffic, leading to congestion, air and noise pollution. Increased e-commerce popularity intensifies these challenges further. The Covid crisis has proven that our urban logistics systems are neither reliable, resilient, nor sustainable.
The objective of the Flagship project “Smart urban multihubs” is to develop a future urban logistics concept that is sustainable, resilient, city-friendly, and that reduces the increasing freight traffic in cities, focussing not only on parcels, but also bulky and other goods deliveries and returns, while increasing the quality of life for city residents. The flagship project follows the hypothesis that bringing logistics activities back into the city centres will reduce the overall logistics burden of an urban area. In doing so, we hypothesise a three-echelon hub system with (1) consolidation hubs at the outskirt of the urban area to bundle goods with similar handling requirements entering the urban area via street, (2) urban multihubs in the city centres, which are accessible via street, rail, and cargo metro and with multi-use areas that are not rented out permanently but in a pay-per-hour system, and (3) decoupling hubs in neighbourhoods and industrial zones to reduce logistics burden of the last mile.
We expect the future urban logistics concept, which is optimised from on the overall urban area perspective rather than from a single organisational perspective to increases logistics efficiency through bundling activities, while leading to reduced costs, reduced vehicle-kilometres driven, CO2 emission savings, and increased social sustainability through higher degree of liveability in cities.
The objective of the Flagship project “Smart urban multihubs” is to develop a future urban logistics concept that is sustainable, resilient, city-friendly, and that reduces the increasing freight traffic in cities, focussing not only on parcels, but also bulky and other goods deliveries and returns, while increasing the quality of life for city residents. The flagship project follows the hypothesis that bringing logistics activities back into the city centres will reduce the overall logistics burden of an urban area. In doing so, we hypothesise a three-echelon hub system with (1) consolidation hubs at the outskirt of the urban area to bundle goods with similar handling requirements entering the urban area via street, (2) urban multihubs in the city centres, which are accessible via street, rail, and cargo metro and with multi-use areas that are not rented out permanently but in a pay-per-hour system, and (3) decoupling hubs in neighbourhoods and industrial zones to reduce logistics burden of the last mile.
We expect the future urban logistics concept, which is optimised from on the overall urban area perspective rather than from a single organisational perspective to increases logistics efficiency through bundling activities, while leading to reduced costs, reduced vehicle-kilometres driven, CO2 emission savings, and increased social sustainability through higher degree of liveability in cities.
