Challenges of urban transport problems and city logistics: Sao Paulo city center case

Traffic congestion continues to worsen in South American cities of all sizes, creating a $ billion annual drain on the South American Countries economy in the form of lost hours and gallons of wasted fuel. The purpose of this work is to provide an overview of urban transport problems and city logistics challenges in Sao Paulo city center. The focus of the discussion is the emerging concept of city logistics to improve the mobility of cities, and the research opportunity that it creates. Production and consumption have long been central to understanding the evolution and management of transport systems. The current paper argues that there are now some new concepts in that understanding which deserve consideration and will shape a different future. On the other hand, the organization of logistics has an effect upon the structure of urban areas. At a simple level, global and continental scale logistics systems are organized around airports, seaports, road and rail systems and storage facilities, which all tend to be space extensive. These challenges are the growth in logistics systems for the globalization of production and consumption, and the related spatial and functional restructuring of large scale urban regions. The core ideas of the paper are that these two changes, associated with innovation and structural change in the economy, have produced concentration as well as dispersal of different types of production and consumption in very large urban regions. They create the need for some new responses in transport planning.