Abstract
Since bicycles and bike-sharing systems are becoming increasingly important in modern transportation contexts, we suggest in this paper an alternative method to incorporate cycling among the freight transport alternatives within urban areas. We propose pursuing a sustainable initiative of crowdsourced delivery where some of the urban good deliveries may be voluntarily undertaken by users of the free-floating bike-sharing systems while following their prefixed route in exchange for some kind of reward. We believe that a network design model that allows properly allocating the resources of the bike-shared mobility service could improve the potential of crowdshipping, making it a viable support and supplement for the local postal services, and more easily accepted and adopted in urban contexts. An application to a case study has been embodied to show the effectiveness and advantages of our proposal.
Highlights
We are living in an era where sustainability, mobility, and quality of life are guiding many actions/decisions taken within both theoretical and practical contexts [1,2]
Since bicycles and bike-sharing systems are becoming increasingly important in modern transportation contexts, we suggest in this paper an alternative method to incorporate cycling among the freight transport alternatives within urban areas
We propose pursuing a sustainable initiative of crowdsourced delivery where some of the urban good deliveries may be voluntarily undertaken by users of the free-floating bike-sharing systems while following their prefixed route in exchange for some kind of reward
Summary
We are living in an era where sustainability, mobility, and quality of life are guiding many actions/decisions taken within both theoretical and practical contexts [1,2]. Looking at the framework described above, we suggest in this paper a sustainable initiative of crowdsourced delivery It proposes that part of the urban good deliveries within urban contexts could be undertaken voluntarily by some users of the free-floating bike-sharing system (FFBSS), which has been opportunely designed in order to meet the needs of the users of the system, and support the local postal services delivering a certain share of their small/light good parcels. We assume that a certain share of the total users of the system has subscribed to the crowdsourced delivery option This means that some individuals (belonging to Ua) are willing to hand over post/small packages while traveling within the urban area by a free-floating bicycle before reaching their final destination. We illustrate how to design a FFBSS to minimize the total amount of lost users: those who were supposed to perform a delivery, and the remaining deliveries
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