The logistification of service trips: implications for urban mobility and public policy

Résumé En

Service trips are a significant and often overlooked portion of urban freight traffic (Campbell et al., 2018). Service trips are called as such because their main purpose is to perform services: repairs, maintenance, installation... The movement of goods necessary to perform these services is an often overlooked - yet crucial - part of carrying out these tasks. As a result, professionals require the use of commercial vehicles to perform these services. Little is known about the characteristics of these trips, but recent papers have highlighted their importance. Holguín-Veras et al. (2021), for example, have shown that service trips represent 12% of commercial trips attracted by commercial activities in downtown NY, and that parking durations are on average thrice as long as for those of other commercial trips. In this paper, we propose: 1) a description of the characteristics of service trips in the Paris Region, depending on the location of service providers and their catchment area, using a quantitative survey administered in 2021; 2) an investigation of the process of "logistification" of service trips - i.e. the externalization of the freight transport portion of service trips to logistics providers - through qualitative interviews ; and 3) an overview of the implications that these service trips and the dynamic of logistification have for urban mobility and public policies.