How to reduce the impact of container flows generated by a maritime terminal on urban transport

One serious problem seaports face today is the lack of space at maritime terminals and the growing congestion on their access routes with the inland connections. Moreover, environmental factors, regulation plans and topological constraints often prevent maritime terminal expansions. Therefore, it is now generally accepted that a strategic choice related to maritime terminals is a “dry port” policy, especially when terminals are located in urban and suburban areas, characterized by heavy commercial traffic. In this work, we deal with the evaluation of possible locations for freight modal terminals with the aim of reducing the impact of containers transport on urban mobility. In particular, we use classical simple plant location algorithms for determining optimal sites on a connected intermodal network, where arc weights refer to costs arising from the transport of standardised units via different modalities. We focus our analysis on the logistic network in the Italian north-western regions, taking into a proper account the needs of the seaport network of the Liguria County and the most congested nodes in the transportation network of the city of Genoa. Related results are presented.