FriendFreight Copenhagen : sustainable goods delivery through a community-based bicycle service

Each day, in any given urban area, hundreds of thousands of small goods are distributed from their points-of-sale to their final destinations. The 'travel demand that is generated from this activity has a significant impact on congestion, pollution and the maintenance of infrastructure in cities. As such, and as the number of items distributed through urban areas continues to rise, city governments are showing increasing interest in strategies that can reduce these negative effects. Most of these strategies treat inner-city goods transportation as optimization issues, whereby an existing delivery system is made to operate more efficiently and effectively - oftentimes through utilizing advances in distributed digital technologies. What is proposed in this thesis, however, is an alternative approach -- a new type of service called FriendFreight, that exploits the untapped freight capacity of personal mobility vehicles, and the real-time location information of people and goods, to enable citizens to deliver items for others while moving through the city themselves. The success of such a service relies not only on the ability to transport goods in an optimal manner but also on an understanding of how and why people might deliver goods for each other. Thus, trust and reciprocity play an important role in the service design. In this thesis, the feasibility of FriendFreight is explored within the specific context of Copenhagen where I propose that the 175,000 bicycles that move through the city each day can be harnessed to deliver small items that people need regularly.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Outram, Christine

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• William J. Mitchell.

• Architecture.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/49545

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/49545