Impact of Time Restriction and Logistics Sprawl on Urban Freight and Environment: The Case of Beijing Agricultural Freight

Time restriction and logistics sprawl (e.g., relocating logistics facilities), as two popular urban policies, usually affect the urban freight and environmental burden, but their combination might lead to unexpected results. This paper analyzes the impact of time restriction and logistics sprawl on urban freight and local environments based on a Beijing agricultural freight case through traffic simulation. The data is derived through a freight demand forecasting method. Based on the data, this paper constructs four groups of scenarios to represent different policies (or combined policies) and then conducts macro-simulation to obtain the economic and environmental indicators. Results show that (1) time restriction can increase the freight costs and slightly decrease local emissions, while logistics sprawl can increase both costs and emissions; (2) the joint implementation of the two policies are proved to be positive in economic and environmental aspects because it helps freight carriers adopt a new strategy to improve delivery efficiency; (3) urban freight policies are closely related to the freight carriers because different responses from carriers can lead to different policy effects.