Gothenburg shares a common challenge with many European cities: the large carbon footprint and connected emissions caused by last-mile delivery practices to its centre.

Now, the city has started a project called “Smoovit” that aims to reduce the number of transport vehicles to the inner-city area by 40%.

Smoovit reorganises the delivery of goods of multiple providers in a 3-step process:

1. It receives data on planned deliveries to the city centre from the providers and calculates an optimal distribution.
2. When arriving at the Urban Consolidation Centre outside the city they reload to larger but fully loaded trucks accordingly.
3. These trucks then head for the urban logistics city hub where goods get loaded to small zero-emission vehicles and are delivered to the final addressees in the city centre.

The small vehicles not only have easier access to dense inner-city areas, they provide a pick-up service for returns as well that get distributed by the city hub.

Smoovit is a joint initiative by industry, academia and society players that developed the system and are now testing it accordingly.

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Article published first at TheMayor.eu on 22 February 2022.