Sustainable urban freight transport adopting public transport-based crowdshipping for B2C deliveries

Cities crave innovative logistics solutions dealing with the requirements of the ‘on demand economy’. The paper estimates the willingness to act as a crowdshipper (supply) and to buy a crowdshipping service (demand) to get goods delivered/picked-up in the last mile B2C e-commerce situation. Specifically, it innovates by considering an environmental-friendly crowdshipping based on the use of the mass transit network of the city where parcels customers/crowdshippers pick-up/drop-off goods in automated parcel lockers located either inside the transit stations or in the surroundings. This issue is very important since “standard” crowdshipping is usually not able to reduce congestion and polluting emissions due to the dedicated trips performed using private motorized vehicles. The paper rests on an extensive stated preference survey. The hypothetical scenarios used to acquire both demand (customers’) and supply (crowdshippers’) preferences make use of the most relevant attributes emerging from a preliminary investigation performed in the study context. The investigation is performed in the city of Rome and the metro is the transit system considered. The results are useful in understanding and quantifying the potential of this freight transport strategy for e-commerce in an urban context and in providing local policy makers with a good knowledge base for its future development.