A Sustainable Crowdsourced Delivery System to Foster Free-Floating Bike-Sharing

Mario Binetti, Leonardo Caggiani, Rosalia Camporeale and Michele Ottomanelli
Additional contact information
Mario Binetti: Department of Civil, Environmental, Land, Building Engineering and Chemistry, Polytechnic University of Bari, Via Edoardo Orabona, 4, 70125 Bari, Italy
Leonardo Caggiani: Department of Civil, Environmental, Land, Building Engineering and Chemistry, Polytechnic University of Bari, Via Edoardo Orabona, 4, 70125 Bari, Italy
Rosalia Camporeale: Division of Transport and Roads, Department of Technology and Society, Lund University, P.O. Box 118, 221 00 Lund, Sweden
Michele Ottomanelli: Department of Civil, Environmental, Land, Building Engineering and Chemistry, Polytechnic University of Bari, Via Edoardo Orabona, 4, 70125 Bari, Italy

Sustainability, 2019, vol. 11, issue 10, 1-24

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.

Keywords: sustainable urban freight transport; cycle logistic; bike courier service; crowdsourced delivery; free-floating bike-sharing systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/10/2772/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/11/10/2772/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:11:y:2019:i:10:p:2772-:d:231240

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().