Potential Impact of Car-Based Crowdshipping on Vehicle Mileage and Carbon Dioxide Emission

Abstract

The significant growth in B2C e-commerce in the last decade increased the traffic and volume of parcels in last-mile delivery significantly. To mitigate the impact of the last-mile delivery service such as the increased traffic and carbon dioxide (CO2) emission, crowdshipping emerged as an innovation that utilise the travelling crowd as occasional courier to deliver parcels. The goal of this study is to analyse the potential impact of crowdshipping performed by private cars to the local vehicle mileage and its result to the CO2 emission. This is done by simulating the passenger and parcel delivery transportation activities in agent-based modelling platform using MASS-GT and MATSim. An integration framework to bridge MASS-GT and MATSim was formulated in this study to model the interaction between the passenger and urban freight transport. Several scenarios are formulated to analyse the impact of crowdshipping. The results show that the CO2 and passenger-kilometres savings in parcel delivery vans transportation is exceeded heavily by the increase in passenger transportation performed by cars. This results in a slight increase in passenger-kilometres travelled and CO2 emission caused by car-based crowdshipping, although the value is very small that could be considered insignificant. It was found that car-based crowdshipping won’t either improve or worsen the impact of the current last-mile delivery system. It could be concluded that crowdshipping will be better performed using a more sustainable transport mode instead.