Freight operations in city centers: A land use conflict in urban planning

Municipalities in Colombia have insubstantially developed methods and technical support to diagnose and plan the supply chain in consolidated urban spaces. This situation becomes critical due to strong illegal occupation and deterioration of public space, overcrowding by vulnerable populations, informal commerce and common delinquency. This research paper aims to present a diagnosis of loading and unloading operations in Cali's city-center and, subsequently, to study some improvement strategies considering stakeholders’ opinion. A combination of methodologies permitted obtaining relevant results that shed light on possible innovative actions to reduce land use conflict in city centers of medium sized cities in emerging countries. The results revealed that the freight parking offer was very scarce and concentrated on bay infrastructure and on-street parking, increasing waiting times and congestion. Parking was not controlled, and illegal practices were present throughout the day, including pedestrian path occupation. A combined set of strategies, such as cargo cycle operation and mini-hubs, could raise the parking offer and adapt to different demand conditions in terms of schedules and vehicles sizes. Cooperation between private stakeholders and the strength of institutional structure is essential to harmonize urban freight evaluations and operations with sustainable mobility policies in city centers. Some strategies require a strong set of public incentives, including tax benefits and logistic land use implementation with price controls. City Centers requires loading and unloading zones and logistic land, besides traffic management policies. Logistic land use is disappearing in central urban zones, which is contradictory and is producing a perverse effect. This is an analysis that reveals the importance of planning mixed land uses that include logistics and different vocations of public space.