APCOA PARKING (APCOA) and UPS have launched an international partnership in the field of environmentally-friendly micro-logistics. For several years now, UPS has been using APCOA car parks in Ireland to transfer deliveries from large containers to cargo bikes for last-mile delivery to end customers. Starting this year, the two companies have extended their partnership to Germany. APCOA and UPS are now collaborating at bases in Dublin, Hamburg and Cologne with plans in place to continuously expand their partnership over the next few years.
By joining forces, the two companies are helping to reduce CO2 emissions, traffic noise and congestion, thereby making urban logistics more sustainable. At the same time, the partnership allows APCOA to exploit existing multi-storey car park capacities as APCOA URBAN HUBS. UPS also benefits from being able to use cargo bikes to accelerate deliveries, as bikes are not held up by traffic jams and can more easily and quickly navigate through urban traffic.
“By joining forces with UPS, we are expanding our URBAN HUBS network, which provides the infrastructure for a wide range of sustainable urban services”, says Philippe Op de Beeck, CEO of APCOA PARKING Group. “By deploying our parking areas as transshipment hubs, we are providing the requisite infrastructure for environmentally-friendly logistics. As a result, we are making a valuable contribution to climate change mitigation and taking another significant step towards becoming the car park of the future”.
Partnership reduces vehicle traffic and benefits urban populations
Under the terms of the new partnership, UPS transports its shipments to APCOA’s car parks by truck, where the containers are unloaded and taken to designated parking spaces. Once the deliveries have been loaded onto cargo bikes, they are taken to customers and the process is repeated until the container is empty. APCOA car parks are also used to park and recharge the cargo bikes.
In 2012, UPS launched its first project to deliver parcels via micro-depots and cargo bikes in Hamburg and has since expanded its sustainable parcel delivery service to more than 30 cities in Germany alone and internationally in several countries. A key challenge in implementing UPS’s City Logistics concept is identifying suitable micro-depots in urban areas.
Under the APCOA URBAN HUBS brand, APCOA is expanding the functionality of its multi-storey car parks in certain city-centre locations and allowing them to be used for services provided by selected strategic partners. This opens up more than 1.5 million parking spaces and over 1.9 million square metres of space for urban logistics, mobility, electric charging infrastructure and technology services and will not least deliver increased revenues and enable new business models to be implemented by parking facility owners.
In the field of logistics, new services include transhipment hubs for parcel couriers and parcel lockers where customers can collect deliveries themselves. Other services available in APCOA car parks include charging points for electric vehicles and rental stations for car-sharing services.