Application of supply chain considerations to estimate urban freight emissions

The estimation of pollutant emissions related to urban freight activities suffers from the same difficulty faced when trying to estimate the characteristics of individual urban freight routes or demand parameters. The great variety of urban freight practices forces to attain this objective only through strong hypotheses and simplifications. We propose here a methodology based on the generic characterization of urban freight routes, identifying the main features of each route type and the type of commercial activities typically served by each one of them. This results in an estimation of the overall urban freight route patterns in a city, which in turn can be used to derive aggregate emission indicators. The methodology is applied to the city of Seville, in the South of Spain, showing promising results.