Comparing the Use of Small Sized Electric Vehicles with Diesel Vans on City Logistics

Many actions have been recently carried out within European cities with the aim of reducing the negative impacts on traffic and environment caused by city logistics. Promising results have been reported with the increasingly popular initiative of the use of small sized electric vehicles (SEV), due to their improved energy efficiency, local zero emissions and lower traffic disturbance. Along this paper, on a first step, the authors estimate the effects of adopting SEV from the city perspective. Therefore, authors analyze how the use of small sized electric vehicles such as tricycles and cargo cycles in city logistics affects traffic, energy efficiency and emissions. First, the authors identify what should be the geographical scale of implementation of small sized electric vehicles solutions. Second, authors identify the market penetration share by small sized electric vehicles that lead to better results in terms of traffic, energy and environment to all stakeholders directly affected by city logistics operations. The assessment follows two distinct approaches, based on geographical coverage and on stakeholders’ impacts. The first one distinguishes the impacts of the initiative at street level, unit level and on the city system. Such analysis reflects the behaviour of the all spatial system and allows having a broader view on the geographical impact of the initiative. The second one distinguishes the respective impacts disaggregated by stakeholder group. It will be presented the environmental, operational and economic effects of 4 scenarios of market penetration by small sized vehicles, replacing diesel vans on city logistics by 10, 30, 50 and 100%. On a second step, authors estimate the effects of adopting SEV from the suppliers (industry) perspective, focusing on operational costs and determining the break-even point. The methodology is applied to Porto (Portugal) and calibrated with real world on-road performance of SEV on different driving conditions. The results show that the geographical scale that leads to better energy, environmental and traffic benefits is the street level, acknowledging the short distance scope of SEV's. At this geographical coverage, SEV lead to better improvements on the motorized mobility of the area, when the scenario represents a market penetration by 10%, with a reduction of delays by 10%, distance travelled by 16% and speed by 7%. In this 10% scenario the WTW energy consumption and CO2 emissions are reduced by 3 to 4%. Also for this scenario, 56 euros per year must be spent to save 1 MJ of energy in WTW, which does not proves the use of SEV's on city logistics as particularly effective.