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Urbanization is important for the growth of cities and their prosperity. It is not that difficult to build higher buildings with smaller flats to allow more people to move into the city. However, it becomes more sophisticated when it comes to handling the resulting traffic. Many municipalities suffer from congestion and the negative effects of overstrained streets. The impacts are far reaching, ranging from environmental damage to adverse economic effects and from increased accident rates to broken roads. Freight traffic plays an important part in this negative development. Lorries obstruct the traffic flow far more than cars, due to sedate driving behavior and their visual obstruction characteristics to other road users. The aims of this book are to create greater understanding of why cities should inaugurate a new urban traffic era in favor to rail-bound systems. Furthermore this work will point out prerequisites and application areas to provide a first introduction into the topic of cargo tramways. Thus, indicating a starting point for further studies.

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Alexander Dimitrov, born 1983 in Sofia, achieved his university-level entrance qualifications at an Austrian higher techn. college for biomedical technology. In 2009 he started working for the Austrian Federal Railway as a telecommunications project engineer. To extend his knowledge he studied Railway-Infrastructure Engineering from 2010 to 2015.

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