A behavioral assessment of parking and pricing urban freight transport policies

City centers are major destinations for goods pick-up and delivery where parking spaces are scarce. The consequence is an increase in the cost of last mile distribution as well as in congestion, vehicle emissions, greenhouse gases, and acoustic pollution. The aim of this paper is to provide valuable tools to help local authorities in designing policy interventions aimed at both fostering cities economic vitality and making urban freight transport sustainable. In particular, the present paper reports an in-depth analysis on transport providers’ preferences, specifically addresses the role played by parking and pricing policies, while jointly testing for non-linear attribute effects and discrete mixture heterogeneity. The data considered were collected in Rome’s limited traffic zone, a 5km2 wide area in the city center, charged with a yearly entrance fee and characterized by scarce parking space. The results obtained help in defining the compensatory measures that alternative interventions need to address in order to make transport providers indifferent to increases in entrance fees or, in general, to the policy introduced.