Abstract

Increasing concerns about sustainable urban freight transport have appeared recently in developed countries. While some methods and indexes exist today to evaluate economic and development sustainability, this paper holds up the need to develop a standard tool to evaluate how an urban freight system is functioning. In this sense, this paper presents the concept, the methodology and the application of a model named Urban Freight Transport Index (UFTI). The general objective of this paper is to propose and apply a methodology for rating and assessing the overall performance of urban freight systems. As a result of the experimental application of UFTI, a mid-size Mexican city was rated on 115 points out of 807 ideal points. It was concluded that the essayed experimental index could be the basis for a more extended standard to be used by local or regional authorities to help the decision making process in urban freight systems.

Key words: Freight transportation, urban development, ratings, city logistics, Mexico.