Why do city logistics initiatives fail?

Despite more than 25 years of research in city logistics, it seems impossible to keep the growing number of, often half-empty, trucks out of our cities. City logistics problems seem unsolvable. Many initiatives fail, other initiatives only survive with subsidies or get caught in bureaucratic systems. But they don’t result in fewer trucks and vans. Why?

Wrong data, wrong issues
At first, the data about urban freight are simply wrong. Did we really look into those trucks? And are the freight data complete? Most trucks are not for retail store deliveries. Vans delivering parcels? Just 5 percent of urban freight vehicles. Too many city logistics initiatives look at these retail and B2C online deliveries.
The question is whether the flows of building materials, deliveries to HoReCa and to offices and waste collection are not more relevant. They are!
City logistics solutions should be fact-based (volumes, problems, and impact), based on the freight bigger volumes and solve relevant issues multiple stakeholders want to solve; multi actor multi criteria.

No segmentation of solutions
The first reports on city logistics from 1992 state that 50 percent of the transports in city centers even came from that city center. This hasn’t changed. Aren’t you going to take them out of town…