GEODIS offers decarbonized delivery in city centres
City-centre deliveries that keep environmental impact to an absolute minimum? That’s the challenge GEODIS is meeting today. Working closely with local stakeholders, we’ve adopted a proactive strategy to decarbonize last-mile deliveries in the French cities of Chartres, Lille and Lyon.
Delivering goods to urban centres
At GEODIS, we’re embracing new ways to get goods into the heart of the city. Using low-emission vehicles, barges, cargo bikes, dedicated urban logistics hubs and other solutions, we plan to offer low-carbon delivery in 40 French cities by 2024.
5,000 sq m
logistics hub just 3 km from the heart of Lille
550
deliveries a day in Chartres
1,000
daily deliveries across the Lyon metropolitan area
Serving 500 businesses in Chartres
Imagine organizing some 550 deliveries a day to over 500 city-centre businesses, including 175 cafés, hotels and restaurants. Now imagine doing all of that and minimizing your impact. It’s a real logistics challenge—and we’re meeting it. In late 2023, the famous cathedral town of Chartres chose us to make last-mile deliveries using electric vehicles.
Commerce and e-commerce
Under the city’s last-mile delivery programme, access to the centre of Chartres is strictly regulated by time window and type of vehicle. We won the contract by offering an innovative urban logistics solution. In addition to serving businesses in the pedestrian centre, we’ll handle some 176,000 e-commerce deliveries a year—and keep pace with a 10% annual increase in volume.
Electric vehicle deliveries
To meet the city’s needs, we’ll centralize all goods bound for the pedestrian zone in a central Distribution & Express facility 3 kilometres from the heart of Chartres. Electric vehicles will take deliveries from this urban hub to recipients, and businesses can choose to collect goods from it directly.
Cargo-bike deliveries in the heart of Lille
Just 3 km from the centre of Lille, we’ve created a new 5,000-sq m logistics hub with a dozen employees. Goods are sorted on site, then distributed to consumers and businesses in the city centre. GEODIS employees make 2 rounds of low-carbon deliveries a day, using cargo bikes and biogas-powered trucks and light vehicles.
Dual-purpose site
One section of the hub is a dedicated delivery area with 10 bay doors, handling goods from GEODIS sites in the nearby suburbs of Lomme and Lesquin. These in turn are linked to our network of facilities in France and other European countries.
The other section is a 3,500-sq m storage area, which our customers can use for on-demand delivery to businesses and e-commerce customers.
Decarbonized solutions from end to end
Our new logistics hub is also close to Lille’s Canal de la Deûle—a link to the ports of Dunkirk, Antwerp and Rotterdam. With this added benefit, business customers can choose decarbonized solutions from end to end.
Express deliveries by river barge in Lyon
In Lyon, we’ve partnered with Urban Logistic Solutions (ULS) to make express deliveries to the urban centre via the Rhône River. Biogas vehicles carry goods from a GEODIS site in the suburb of Corbas to Edouard Herriot port on the south side of the city. From there, barges take them upriver to Quai Morand, where they’re loaded onto e-bikes for the last leg. Each delivery is tracked in real time.
Easing urban congestion
“Given the layout of the centre and the easy river access, the combination of barge and eco-friendly transport seemed obvious to us,” says Stéphane Cassagne, CEO France, GEODIS. “This new system eases congestion in the heart of Lyon and helps our customers meet their aspirations.”
ULS President Thomas Castan praised the boat, barge and bike delivery system, which “relieves urban congestion and has a positive effect on traffic and pollution.” This fast, efficient service also makes use of existing GEODIS infrastructure in the Lyon metropolitan area.
ULS—a sustainable urban logistics partner
ULS can handle anything from letters to parcels to pallets, and from flour to beverages. Its full-scale, integrated solution for sustainable urban logistics uses waterways and e-bikes with trailers to deliver goods to individuals, shops and businesses in Strasbourg. It also collects returnable containers and recyclables such as paper and cardboard. ULS introduced the service in Strasbourg and then expanded to Lyon in June 2023. It plans to serve 19 French cities.
In Alençon, bicycle tours of the city center
After Lille and Chartres, GEODIS has replaced delivery vans with bicycles in Alençon, Normandy, to deliver parcels in the city center. In the summer of 2023, the local branch was equipped with a cargo bike, driven by two employees in turn, and capable of carrying over 200 kg of goods. Also with a view to :
- access pedestrian streets in the city center over longer opening hours,
- offer a less polluting last-mile service.
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