Impact of Time Restriction and Logistics Sprawl on Urban Freight and Environment: The Case of Beijing Agricultural Freight
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear Authors,
Commenst are presented in the attached file
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
We thank you very much for your valuable comments and suggestions, which help us to significantly improve our paper. We greatly appreciate the time you put in reviewing our paper. Our response letter can be seen in the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Please find the attached file for this reviewer's comments.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
We thank you very much for your valuable comments and suggestions, which help us to significantly improve our paper. We greatly appreciate the time you put in reviewing our paper. Our response letter can be seen in the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The paper is about two popular urban freight policies i) time restriction and ii) logistics sprawl. The overall structure is good and covers the areas addressed in a scientific paper. However, there are many issues related to the scientific reasoning of the work that is not covered adequately in the document.
The authors do not provide a good reasoning for addressing these two policies is missing. There is no explanation/definition of the two policies being studied. Especially, logistics sprawl is mainly found in literature as the reason for the negative impacts of freight transportation. Here, it is presented as a measure, but there is a confusion where off-hours deliveries fit in. Authors claim that both selected measures have found to increase cost (for who?) and carbon, but there are many references which indicate that such measures may be beneficial to the city. Later, they show that the kilometers traveled were reduced, under such a policy.
Literature review is rather short and not very extensive for an 18-page scientific paper. It would be preferable here to have in figures the impacts of the policies in the area of Transport and Environment and be compared with the current research’s results. In addition, it would be interesting to present the context that affects the efficiency of the policy in each case.
The authors propose traffic simulation as their contribution. This is an appropriate method to obtain indicator values and the results are valid and useful. The authors mention four-stage. I assume that they imply the four-stages in transportation planning, but it is not made obvious when it appears in the abstract and text. It is not clear how the O-D data were obtained. Data derivation section is very short and does not adequately explains what methodology was implemented. In all, the methodological steps are vague and abstract. There is also a confusion with the Stage1 and stage2, mentioned later. Also, there is a confusion with macro and micro simulation, which has not been presented in the methodology part, although said it would.
Are oil and labor costs the only costs considered? How are they incorporated in the total cost? How are the delivery time and VKT compared to it? Also, the environmental emissions. How is the effectiveness calculated?
Overall, the paper lacks scientific grounds and proper justification.
Author Response
We thank you very much for your valuable comments and suggestions, which help us to significantly improve our paper. We greatly appreciate the time you put in reviewing our paper. Our response letter can be seen in the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear Authors,
I'm glad that you foud my comments helpful.
