Potentials of electric vehicles in innovative city-logistics: A case study from Karlsruhe, Germany

Urban traffic is increasing, resulting in congestions, air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. One option to reduce urban traffic and its impacts are innovative city logistics concepts (CLC) in combination with battery electric vehicles (BEV). However, logistics service providers (LSP) are reluctant to implement CLCs or BEVs due to little knowledge on the potential economic and ecological benefits. Thus, our aim is to explore the acceptance of CLCs and BEVs among LSPs and to analyze the economic and ecological benefits of such concepts and how BEVs contribute to potential benefits. Using expert interviews as well as techno-economic and ecological analysis, we find that BEVs show the highest acceptance among LSPs, followed by city-hubs, micro-hubs with electric freight bikes on the last mile and night-time delivery. We also find that micro-hubs improve the economic and ecological performance of logistics operations, while night-time delivery shows no benefits. BEVs turn out to be more expensive for both CLCs but clearly improve the ecological performance.