The chapter moves from the belief that adopting a supply chain approach
is crucial to understand how urban freight distribution works and what will be
the impact of the various potential urban transport policies on supply chain
performance. According to a recent strand of the literature, the chapter aims at
(a) characterizing the urban supply chains; (b) discussing how a urban supply
chain can be modelled, which role do actors play and how the coordination
issue can be handled; (c) showing how transport decisions, in particular
whether to use own-account or third-party transport operators, are dealt within
each urban supply chain and by each actor; and analysing how urban supply
chains are affected by the many proposed freight transport policies. Although
much progress has been made in the field, both with regard to modelling and
empirical analysis, it is concluded that important progress needs to be made
with regard to both the ex-ante and the ex-post evaluation of the private
and social efficiency of the different urban supply chains and on how they are
impacted by local authorities’ transport policies.
