On 1 January 2025, Rotterdam introduced the largest zero-emission zone for city logistics in the Netherlands, covering the entire area within the ring road. To outsiders, it may look like a switch that was simply flipped. A new paper by Quak, Kin, Van Duin, Streng and Sjouke in the City Logistics 2025 proceedings (Transportation Research Procedia, Vol. 98) shows the opposite: the ZEZ was the culmination of two decades of patient community building, analyzed here through the lens of Loorbach’s transition management theory.
The timeline is instructive. In 2002, logistics in Rotterdam was still seen as purely a market responsibility. Air quality concerns changed that from 2007 onwards, leading to trust-building between the municipality and transporters, the EcoStars program, and, in 2014, the Green Deal 010 Zero Emission City Logistics (signed by the city, TNO, and five regional companies), with the deliberately ambitious aim of emission-free city-center logistics by 2020.
That target proved unachievable, but the authors argue it did exactly what it needed to do: it forced concrete action. The Green Deal functioned as a textbook “transition arena”. A small group of frontrunners with a shared vision, real experiments (FREVUE, CITYLAB, BuyZET, the pioneering ZE carrier BREYTNER), and plenty of shared learning, positive and negative.
The national Climate Agreement of 2019 then provided the legal framework and a realistic date: 2025. Rotterdam moved fast because the community already existed. A covenant with 56 partners fixed the zone boundaries in December 2020, and the number of partners grew to 75, with a Logistiek 010 community of over 3,000 participants. Crucially, communication remained consistent for years regarding the size of the zone, the timeline, and the exemptions, which made the municipality a credible partner. Even a change of local administration in 2022 didn’t derail the plans. Transporters themselves asked for a large zone: big enough to justify their investment in electric vehicles.
The paper distills the success factors: early stakeholder involvement, ambitious but adjustable goals, transparent communication, logistics brokers giving personalized advice to SMEs, data-driven monitoring, political commitment across three different councils; and “practice what you preach”, with the city electrifying its own fleet. Refreshingly, the authors also name what failed: hubs never played their expected role in reducing logistics trips, and the national reversal on low-emission zones for passenger cars created awkward inconsistencies.
The core lesson for other cities: a ZEZ is not a traffic order but a transition. Rotterdam didn’t consciously follow transition management theory, yet ended up executing all four of its steps. Sustainable city logistics isn’t decreed; it’s organized over twenty years, with a community that trusts you.