City Logistics in historic centers: Multi-Criteria Evaluation in GIS for city of Salvador (Bahia – Brazil)

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Abstract

The City Logistic brings a new concept in land use planning and management of urban logistics flows, resolving problems related to urban goods movement, while seeking a balance between the efficiency required by urban freight and the social costs involved (traffic congestion product, environmental impacts and energy conservation). This article seeks to investigate the relationship between urban freight and shape, design, zoning and urban planning to establish City Logistic strategies that support land use planning and organization of logistics flows in the city center of Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. The methodology is mainly based on the use of geoprocessing techniques which are used do diagnose the spatial concentration of Freight Trip Generation Centers in terms of the potentially produced travel in Salvador’s central area. Furthermore, the methodology used the Multi-Criteria Evaluation (MCE) in GIS (Geographic Information System) for identifying suitability maps related to urban logistics activities and land use compatibility. The latter served as a basis to identify strategies and measures of City Logistic to support the improvement of urban logistics in the study area.

Introduction

Efficient and environmentally friendly logistic systems contribute to cities’ competitiveness in terms of economic development. Due to the expansion of urban areas and the relative growth of economic activities, logistical facilities find space and location in areas immediately outside the city centers and in the peripheries. Decisions being made today on land use within these territories in relation to the location and attributes of facilities that make up the global logistics network will have impacts on the landscape, resource use, and economic and social geography of metropolitan areas for the next decades (Cidell, 2011).

There is a very high cost in terms of money and time caused by the movement of freights in city centers: the cost of road transport has increased due to the reduction of the load factor of the trucks. This decrease in freight volume is caused by the spreading of deliveries to meet the new demands of consumers (e-commerce, home deliveries). Studies from CSCMP – Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals – show that the distribution of goods to final destination in cities (the so-called “last mile”) represents, on average, 28% of the total transportation cost and approximately 30% of the traffic volume in the big cities (Carvalho, 2017). City logistics is one of the most polluting segments of transport. Although it accounts for 10–15% of city’s traffic, it is responsible for one fourth of CO2 emissions, one third of NOx emissions and half of the particulate matter generated by the transport sector in large European cities (Dablanc, 2011).

The main negative impacts of freight transport are: congestion, air pollution, noise, security, scarce accessibility and intrusion, and they are worthy, in the urban context, of being treated as key factors in the implementation of public policy measures. These impacts determine costs of time and accidents caused directly and indirectly by freight vehicles.

In this scenario, historical centers add the special necessity of preserving the historical assets and heritage, as well as the overall quality image and attractiveness of the urban setting in relation to the city touristic goals and activities. These parts of the city are a valuable resource for tourism and related businesses, instead freight vehicles circulation becomes an obstacle for a wider exploitation and development of such a resource. On the other hand, a more intensive “use” of the historic center for tourism, promotional events and related business activities may easily generate further obstacles for the effective and efficient operation of city distribution and logistics processes. For the above reasons, the need to provide measures reducing the circulation of freight vehicles and commercial vans in the urban historic center is of an increased concern. Indeed, socio-economic impacts and the impacts of logistics operations on the quality and liveability of the center are definitely higher than in larger, non-historic urban centers (Enclose, 2012).

In Brazil, the planning and management of urban logistics are not yet properly included in public policies. At the federal level, the recent Law no. 12,587/2012, on the National Policy on Urban Mobility (Presidência da Republica, 2012), regulates urban transport services, including in the object the transportation of freight, but to be noted is the absence of specific guidelines for this service. Decisions about planning and management of urban logistics also require structural and reliable data, which in Brazil are still scarce and not readily accessible. Origin/Destination surveys are scarce for the urban transportation of freight in general. The modeling of urban freight flows is a scarcely considered aspect of infrastructure planning, which can bring, in simple ways, great improvements in both logistic business results and the quality of life in Brazilian cities (Lima Junior, 2011).

The problems generated by the movement of goods in urban areas and the existing theoretical gaps have motivated the development, in the 1990s in many European countries, of pilot projects concerning the planning of freight distribution in urban centers, better known as “City Logistics” (da Dutra, 2004). The concept of City Logistics can be defined as “the process for the complete optimization of logistics and transport activities by private companies in urban areas, considering the increase and congestion of traffic and fuel consumption within an economy structure market” (Taniguchi, 2001).

Section snippets

The problem in the historic center of Salvador, Brazil

Most Latin American and Brazilian cities were historically structured around traditional historical commercial centers, neighborhoods that, in the majority of cases, nowadays constitute spaces in a stark process of urban and environmental degradation. This characteristic setting in the cities of developing countries presents several particularities and challenges for the logistic performance, which requires a greater understanding of the factors and the established relationship between these

City Logistics and the relationship between transport and land use

City Logistics brings a new concept, integrating land use planning and urban logistical flows management, to solve the cause of freight transportation problems by acting on the factors that characterize each context, for example: organization, planning, land use, vehicle routing, number of trips and vehicle load capacity. (Civitas, Elan, 2012). Travel and location decisions are determined by one another, and therefore both transport planning and land use need to be coordinated with the

Methodology

The methodology adopted in this work and presented in the flowchart of Fig. 3 is structured as a Multi-Criteria Evaluation project in a GIS environment, which receives feedback and receives important subsidies from the theoretical framework and expert opinion.

First, the urban logistic system of the central area of the city of Salvador was represented and evaluated through the location of 357 commercial enterprises that represent the Freight Trip Generation Centers in the study area, as well as

Results

The suitability map represents a continuous surface of aptitude or gradient, where all the pixels have a score between 0 (more suitable) and 1 (less suitable), as a result of the interpretation of the factors in an MCE-GIS. The continuous gradient of suitability was grouped into only 2 classes of Moderate and Low suitability to facilitate map reading (Table 3).

The second class represents the most critical sections: they belong to the low suitable class (red color on the map) and they are the

Conclusions

The methodology used in this article has great flexibility, implementing a learning process that set up a study platform for several urban logistics settings, which proved to be very useful for the diagnosis and management of the urban logistics system in historical centers, relating factors of transport and land use. The flexibility of the Multicriteria Analysis - GIS module allowed us to combine one or more factors/maps in the Weighted Linear Combination by implementing the construction of

Future developments

A contribution that the present research can offer for future works is the possibility of carrying out specific studies of City Logistics by individual sections of network. In fact, the division of the street system into sections allows a detailed analysis of the suitability, as well as, through GIS, understands the participation of each factor in this degree of suitability. A study of the future allocation of urban activities (typologies of Freight TGC) according to City Logistics policies is

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgements

This research was partially supported by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPQ) of Brazil.

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