**1. Introduction**

An increasing noticeable focus on the adoption of cargo cycles for commercial deliveries and their social and economic impacts has been shown in local, national or Europe-wide projects and communication campaigns, together with a more comprehensive analysis of factors and policies characterizing non-motorized mobility programs at large [1–7]. In particular, such policies have relevant impacts on the achievement of sustainable urban mobility goals as well as on the improvement of local economy and employment— e.g., by minimizing European economy losses (ca. 1% of gross domestic product) due to the congestion and prolongation of private and commercial journeys [4,8–10].

The existing literature in this research area also identifies manifold aspects, which vary from region to region—e.g., either cities or countries [11–15]. Area- and project-specific variables include (but are not limited to) speed and size of vehicles, trip generation potential in the surroundings, driver's experience and confidence, weather conditions, number of traffic lanes and side roads, outside lane width, integration of land use and transportation planning, pavement surface quality and traffic signals [4,16–18]. Hence, analyzing differences across countries, regions and cities is crucial since it may bring significant policy implications, which vary widely throughout the European scenario [19,20].

The literature review has been partly extended to include active travel behavior since many factors and policies affecting bike delivery initiatives were found to be delved into in scientific publications concerning the field of non-motorized travel at large. In fact,

**Citation:** Giglio, C.; Musmanno, R.; Palmieri, R. Cycle Logistics Projects in Europe: Intertwining Bike-Related Success Factors and Region-Specific Public Policies with Economic Results. *Appl. Sci.* **2021**, *11*, 1578. https:// doi.org/10.3390/app11041578

Academic Editor: Michele Roccotelli

Received: 29 December 2020 Accepted: 6 February 2021 Published: 9 February 2021

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**Copyright:** © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

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factors and policies encouraging non-motorized or active travel behavior often include specific measures geared to foster cycle logistics initiatives, especially in some European regions [1–7,9,10]. This way, it is more likely to capture all possible aspects potentially impacting cycle logistics initiatives. However, the significance of such aspects has been tested with statistical analyses later on in this paper.

The same applies to the investigation of factors and policies in different regions. In fact, it has been conducted on projects run on a global basis in order to avoid excluding relevant aspects not covered by studies limited to the European scenario from the statistical analysis.

Overall, this research work proposes a cross-regional comprehensive study on cycle logistics projects in Europe. It considers both projects' features and policies in the European area, together with the corresponding economic, financial impacts. The adoption of a Europe-wide perspective is among the key contributions of this paper. In fact, the review of hitherto published works in the literature shows that existing research directs its efforts toward studies limited to urban, regional and national contexts—more than comparing Europe-wide geographical areas—as well as to themes related to public health, environment, quality of life, etc. As a result, any cross-national approach is overlooked—especially pertaining to economic, financial results—thus showing how such a Europe-wide analysis of policies and impacts is unexplored.

The aim of this paper is to statistically test whether and which specific, distinctive characteristics of European cycle logistics projects and the corresponding supporting policies have an impact on their economic performances in terms of profit and profitability.

The paper is structured as follows: after the introduction, the second section provides an extensive and complete literature review in order to identify success factors for cycle logistics projects, including brief references to some closely related aspects concerning active travel at large; in the third section, data collection and processing methods and the methodological approach are described; the fourth section includes some discussions about results; in the last section, conclusive remarks are presented.
