A novel approach for assessing sustainable city logistics

City logistics is a key catalyst in the urban economy but, in parallel, urban road freight transport significantly affects the quality of life in the urban environment. Optimization of urban freight transport (UFT) can make an important contribution to the sustainability and livability of cities, conducing in the alleviation of traffic congestion and the mitigation of CO2 emissions and noise impacts. The detailed understanding of the causal effect of UFT measures on achieving sustainability of city logistics is the main scope of this paper. Life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) is adopted to assess selected UFT measures by advancing the research in life cycle analysis (LCA) to city logistics processes. Focusing on administrative/regulatory schemes, strongly related to city typology, a scenario is evaluated and two indices are estimated, one addressing the city (demand logistics sustainability index), and the second referring to logistics stakeholders (supply logistics sustainability index). The difference between the two indices, referred to as logistics gap, is also estimated.