Everyone agrees that last-mile delivery is a major challenge:

• An essential urban function: there can be no city without urban delivery and last-mile service.
• Efficient (stores are stocked, customers are delivered)
• Not efficient (there are many negative externalities in the form of pollution and, above all, congestion, which itself generates pollution).
• Complex: there is no such thing as a single urban logistics chain, but rather a multiplicity of sectors, each subject to different constraints that make it difficult to pool resources.
• Unbalanced: to put it simply, the (European) city is an area of consumption. It produces waste...
• Constantly evolving: where there's consumption, there's commerce. And commerce is evolving.
• The crossroads of mobility, urban planning and the environment involves 4 groups:
  - public authorities (especially local authorities)
  - shippers, §transporters
  - consumers.

For this to work, we need to strike the right balance between all these players. Public authorities have many levers for action, notably local regulations (gauges, schedules, etc.) and parking (sharing public space).

There are many issues, not all of which are independent of each other, and they often find their solutions through the same paths:

• City center accessibility issues: restricted access zones, physical accessibility problems for certain vehicles, nuisances for local residents: congestion and occupation of urban space, noise, etc.
• Modal shift to be developed to deliver to city centers. The only promising option is river transport (more than 80 major European cities have rivers running through them).
• The challenge of air pollution. Nevertheless, great progress has been made, with a 2:1 reduction in 20 years, and the gradual arrival of new vehicles and new clean energies should enable a further 2:1 reduction in 5/10 years.
• Growing demand for final deliveries of small parcels to the home or to relay points, with more and more deliveries made by micro-vehicles (bicycles, scooters, LCVs), which multiply the number of transport vehicles but enable very fine coverage.
• The challenge of multiplying the number of players and intermediaries, with cost-sharing leaving very little margin for each.

Faced with these challenges, logistics players are still looking for the right compromises based on the classic avoid / shift / improve approach, following a thorough analysis of the area, identification and measurement of flows, and elaboration of expected trajectories.

• Everything that can be avoided: for example, delivering to an absent customer, empty mileage, etc.
• Everything that can be changed: methods (e.g. by consolidating flows), modes of transport, energies, etc...
• Everything that can be improved: for example, management of public space, local regulations, optimization of routes, address accuracy, etc.

This then translates into:

• Firstly, in terms of logistics organization: grouping deliveries to optimize routes, urban logistics areas for a massified approach segment and final delivery in small vehicles.
  - Much remains to be done, and this will require an approach involving a regulatory authority (as in the passenger sector) to massify, pool and further optimize routes.
• The use of waterways, even if the potential remains small in relation to the city's overall needs
• Find the right solutions for individual final deliveries: set up lockers at the bottom of buildings or in high-traffic areas, limit deliveries to 1 day or a few hours only to really urgent needs,
• Choosing the right energy sources for urban logistics: the best emerging solutions are electric and biogas.
• Business models come in all shapes and sizes, depending on the objectives of the shipper and the end customer:
  - for the shipper, own delivery, direct choice of local service providers for local collaboration, use of large logistics networks to avoid having to deal with them
  - for the end customer, he generally has a choice of delivery times and service providers, with costs that do not reflect the reality of direct costs... and even less of externalities (often free of charge!).

Remember that to make the right choices, you need the right information. It's TK'Blue's role to provide distributors, transporters and local authorities with indicators and analyses.