This chapter proposes an exploratory gravity accessibility analysis applied to urban goods transport in Lyon, France to support public decision choices in terms of retailing land use. The proposed indicator is shopping-trip oriented but with a viewpoint of urban goods transport: it considers freight generation (i.e., commodity quantities) at destination and travel issues between household locations and retailing areas for shopping purposes. First, an overview of accessibility used in both urban personal and goods mobility is made, and the proposed analysis motivated. Second, the main methodological elements are presented, focusing on the modelling issues mobilized for indicator construction. Third, the analysis is applied to the current situation for the urban area of Lyon. Results are presented and discussed. Finally, recommendations to public authorities for land-use and mobility (both for people and goods) policy assessment are proposed.
TopIntroduction
Urban goods transport flow modelling and data production is a popular subject, both in research and practice, and different frameworks of various direct application issues have been proposed and implemented in the last decades (Watson, 1975; Ogden, 1992; Anand et al., 2012, 2015; Comi et al., 2012; Gonzalez-Feliu and Routhier, 2012; Holguin-Veras et al., 2012; Taniguchi and Thompson, 2015; Gonzalez-Feliu, 2018a,b). Most of them focus on retail deliveries, the part of urban goods which is one of easiest to optimize, and the last part of the transport chain, i.e. the trips of inhabitants to purchase and bring purchased goods to the consumption place, are less studied. Recently, models integrating shopping trips as part of urban goods transport start to be generalized (Russo and Comi, 2010; Crocco et al., 2010; Gonzalez-Feliu et al., 2012; Nuzzolo and Comi, 2014; Barone et al., 2014; Gonzalez-Feliu and Peris-Pla, 2017). However, those models focus mainly on transport planning issues, with little attention on the land-use component of urban planning. However, when planning the development of a city, both at an economic and spatial scale, it is important to take into account the consequences of such development on transport, and accessibility analyses are validated methods that merit to be also applied to urban goods transport. To deal with those spatial and land-use issues, two main approaches can be used: the novel notion of land-use and logistics interaction models (LULI), which follows the principles of Woudsma et al. (2008) and extends to logistics and freight transport the main principles of transport and land use interaction (LUTI) models (some of them also including goods transport in general LUTI models, De la Barra, 1989), or the notion of accessibility, often used in urban planning, which seldom takes into account the goods transport and supply structures in an explicit way.
LULI and LUTI models are mainly proposed to examine the links and dynamics between transport systems (or logistics schemes) development and the evolution of land-use policies and practices, and are complex models assessing usually multiple year future scenarios. Accessibility approaches are mainly used to assess the potential of new transport infrastructure or system development and can make a diagnosis (mainly static, but reproducible in a multi-year scenario) of socio-spatial impacts of a transport or logistics scheme in a given area (Gonzalez-Feliu, 2018a). However, and although freight accessibility starts to be developed (Gonzalez-Feliu and Peris-Pla, 2017) and presents a high potential (van Wee, 2016), the issues related to retailing remain less developed, the focus on shopping trips as goods transport flows being still underdeveloped.