Strategic Scenarios for Sustainable Urban Distribution in the Brussels-Capital Region Using Urban Consolidation Centres

This paper describes a methodology that was used in order to establish strategic scenarios for city distribution of goods in the Brussels-Capital Region (BCR) using Urban Consolidation Centres (UCCs). Recently, UCCs received a lot of attention as a solution to decrease the environmental impact of urban freight transport in the Brussels-Capital Region. However, despite the growing interest from both public and private actors, many questions regarding their practical implementation remain. In fact, there are a large number of uncertainties with regards to the implementation of the consolidation scenarios, such as the number, location and size of the UCC(s), the vehicle fleet, the regulatory and market framework or the operational agreements. This leads to a large number of possible scenarios. In this paper, authors describe a scenario-planning methodology that was applied in order to select a limited number of scenario themes. Authors present several quantitative models that were used to evaluate possible scenarios and select the most relevant ones.