City Logistics

My name is Ibrahim Hussen Yussufe and I'm from Addis Ababa - Ethiopia. I am currently working at Addis Ababa City Roads Authority /AACRA/, as a Senior Procurement Specialist for the World Bank financed project known as Addis Ababa Urban Transport and Land Use Support Project /AAUTLUSP/. I have BA Degree with Economics and Masters Degree with Urban Management specializing in Urban housing provision and Management. Since I am both Urban management and Economics professional, I am very interested in all urban related issues: city logistics, urban housing, urban infrastructure and urban transport managements. Regarding my country's city logistics and fright transport, there is no any restriction between fright transport and other transportation. Once in the past it was tried to restrict heavy vehicles which serve as fright transportation service not to inter in to inner part of the city i.e. Addis Ababa, especially at pick hours. It was only allowed to use the ring road which was circling the entire city Addis Ababa, while by now due to fast horizontal expansion of the city, the ring road which was out side the major part of the city in the past is now becoming part and parcel of the main city and no more circling the city of Addis Ababa. Moreover, there is one big market in our city called "Merkato" in Amharic language and it is the biggest market not only in Ethiopia but also in Africa. This market area is located at the inner part of the city and all day to day consumable goods including food items and other non consumable goods are used to be delivered there for whole sales and redistributed to sole sales. I think we can easily understand how far this situation creates problem of congestion, air pollution and traffic accident. This shows an importance of the real and proper city logistics management and urban fright transport management, for cities like Addis Ababa. I think this course can bring difference for me and for others who are from the same city like Addis. Thanks! Wish you and me all the best from this short term course.        

Greetings to all participants and to the moderators/teachers too.

My name is Luís Roberto Ramírez, I'm 28 and I'm from Brazil. To be more specific, I nowaday live in Rio de Janeiro, but I do go in regular basis to my hometown, Petrópolis. Petrópolis is a city with almost 300.000 people and is almost a hour from Rio. Both of them have problems with the logistic, and one of the keys to increase the quality of life is transport.
I'm a Civil Engineer. For the last 4 years I've been working with hidroeletric power plants, but I do keep tracking papers and news about public transportation and city logistic. As Rio will host Olympic Games in 2016, this became a major plot and actually some work have been done (expansion of metro line as an exemple). 

My knowledge of the topic is limited, as I said before, because I work in a different part of Engineering. But I do try to keep in touch with this area, reading news about and papers about public transport. 

My name is Dristy Shrestha. I live in Kathmandu, the capital city of Nepal. I am pursuing my bachelors in Environment Studies from Tribhuwan University and recently, I am working for carfree.com which proposes that Carfree Cities can be the most sustainable model in terms of urban development with minimum financial and technical requirements.

I am also been working for a campaign entitled "KtmWalks" which promotes walking and cycling culture in the ancient core Kathmandu which is a medieval city build in pedestrian scale. In community consultation process for the core area vehicle-free campaign, the need of efficient transport system has been highly realized. I expect to know more about experience and planning about similar community engagement programs.

The expectations from this course is to gain the knowledge on the multi modal mobility and be able to propose a transport strategy for the core area of the city and similar outlets in Nepal. 

Hello! I am João from Lisbon, Portugal. Graduated in Biochemistry and also studied Anthropology.

A few years ago I started to get really interested in Sustainable Transportation and Urban Mobility although never done any professional work on it. This is a subject I wish to develop further so that I can give my contribute in building better cities in Portugal.  

Lisbon is a small city facing huge problems, especially with congestion, traffic speed, parking, pollution and walkability. Even though some progress has been made - 30km/h zones, cycle paths, low-emission zones - there is still many more that can be done.

Due to its narrow and steep streets on the old city centre it is quite a challenge to bring freight trucks and delivery vans to some areas. As a fan of cargo bikes I'd love to know more how they could be implemented in Lisbon.

I am looking forward to learning more about City Logistics as my knowledge on the subject is quite limited.

Hello,

this is Andrea Rosa, a transport enegineer working in transport planning as an independent consultant (after several years in academia and in consultancy). I have worked in recent years on long distance freight transport and more recently on a project about city logistics. I had the chance to interview several stakeholders carriers, logistics service providers, different kinds of shops and restaurants, civil servants and this gave me the first and precious _real_ insight in city logistics. I understood my previous knowledge was really limited and I discovered a topic that is as fascinating as it is complex. And that is so little known to public authorities...

I live in Torino, Italy, a city of about 900,000 people with a grater metropolitan area that accommodate twice that number of people.

I seem to have limited luck in finding the time for these very interesting courses (I meant to take part into the first wave of city logistics back in Spring but in the end could not) and now I am starting the coursework late but willing to make up for the time lost!