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

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.