Currently, remarkable gaps of operational, social and environmental efficiency and overall sub-optimization of the logistics and mobility systems exist in urban areas. There is then the need to promote and assess innovative transport solutions and policy-making within SUMPs (Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans) to deal with such critical issues in order to improve urban sustainability. The paper focuses on the case study of the Venice Lagoon, where islands—despite representing a relevant feature of urban planning—face a tremendous lack of accessibility, depopulation, social cohesion and they turn out to be poorly connected. By developing an original scenario-building methodological framework and performing data collection activities, the purpose of the paper consists of assessing the feasibility of a mixed passenger and freight transport system —sometimes called cargo hitching. Mixed passenger and freight systems/cargo hitching are considered as an innovative framework based on the integration of freight and passenger urban systems and resources to optimize the existing transport capacity, and thus, urban sustainability. Results show that the overall existing urban transport capacity can accommodate urban freight flows on main connections in the Lagoon. The reduction in spare public transport capacity, as well as in the number (and type) of circulating freight boats show—in various scenarios—the degree of optimization of the resulting urban network configuration and the positive impacts on urban sustainability. This paves the way for the regulatory framework to adopt proposed solutions.

The current global crisis and other socio-economic and political events highlight the need for a better understanding of future (medium/long term) developments in transport and logistics systems and networks worldwide in a context of sustainability. Quite surprisingly, although transport and logistics are rather relevant sectors in global growth and trade, literature on future scenarios of logistics systems, identifying potential agents of change and forecasting new trends in global patterns of medium/long term logistics flows, turns out to be quite limited. While purely quantitative forecasts of logistics parameters and variables are easily available from a variety of sources, we found that studies using qualitative and strategic approaches in the building of future scenarios are mostly developed for sectors other than logistics and transportation (e.g., manufacturing). Therefore there is the need to address the issue of scenario-building in the field of global logistics through an efficient strategic method. Although few studies (the most relevant being Lapide’s MIT SC2020 Project: Supply Chains Futures) have thus far adopted it, the Strategic Planning Approach (SPA) provides just such methodology. The paper seeks to fill this gap by employing a quali-quantitative methodology based on the SPA to provide a number of macro medium term scenarios in the field of global logistics and assessing the impacts on the European area. Following a comprehensive literature review, a preliminary grid of main drivers of change is derived to be presented for focus groups analyses. The groups are representative of both supply and demand perspectives within the global logistics sector. The analyses are conducted in a semi-structured interviews format where a number of strategic scenarios for global logistics are built – each scenario defined in terms of a combination of strategic drivers. In particular, results show how a specific model at the macro level – Symmetric Global Logistics Model (SGLM) – will be likely to prevail on a global scale, in which two fundamental sub-components (local/global) will play a determinant role. The impact of the SGLM is then strategically assessed with regards to European logistics systems. In conclusion, Europe is likely to face a strengthening of both its logistics and industrial capabilities – though at a different pace of development with respect to emerging economies – in a context in which North African and Eastern European markets will play a fundamental role in production-logistics platforms.

The various social, political, environmental, and economical mega-trends together with the rapid rise of digitalization are shaping cities worldwide including the way that citizens and products move within the urban environment. New mobility services are popping up which are showing the path toward more on-demand and personalized mobility patterns. The transformation of the urban mobility environment though constitutes a great challenge for policy-makers, as little is known about the impact of these trends on the city’s current mobility environment while the assessment of the future state of a mobility system can be considered a quite complex process taken its multi-parametric and multi-dimensional nature. This paper aims to simplify this process by presenting a coherent multi-actor consequence analysis framework as a tool for assessing future mobility scenarios which was developed in the framework of the H2020 SPROUT. This paper presents in detail the main components of this framework together with the list of key performance indicators used for assessing the performance in terms of sustainability of future mobility scenarios as well as indicative results from its use by the city of Padua.