Day 5 of Xmas — Crowd Delivery
Crowd shipping or crowd delivery is new type of service offered where deliveries are made by people who are traveling along the same routes.
Nimber is a Norwegian based company bringing crowd shipping to the UK. They match senders and bringers. Senders upload items that they want delivered and where the items will need to travel to and from. When tasks are accepted they meet with the bringers so that the items can be delivered. Bringers can be traveling by any means of transport. They advertise the routes they are traveling to and from. They use the app to decide to accept deliveries at certain a price and payments are accepted via the app. Senders can track and be kept updated of the status of their delivery.
Similar services are appearing in every market in cities where there is sufficient concentration of people. We have found Tzig and iCarry in Italy and MeeMeep and Crowd.Delivery in Australia, Hitchit and Deliv in the US.
What’s amazing is that the economics also works out cheaper with crowd shipping as pointed out in Rachel Botsman’s blog post.
“Up until now, the faster you got something, the more expensive it was but crowdshipping turns that cost model upside-down.”
Cycling helps saves a third of the road space compared to driving and help cuts congestion and do not create air pollution. Enter Pedals Delivery — an exciting London based crowd delivery company operating entirely by cyclist. They deliver one off or multi drops and they work with businesses to provide a clean zero CO2 emissions logistics service. Using the spare capacity of cyclist, they offer a friendly, personalised on demand delivery service. They work with London based businesses who share similar value of protecting the environment who wants to develop eco-conscious customers.
Green sustainable deliveries will continue to grow as we see more innovation happening in cleaner vehicles, improvements in legislation and increasing awareness. Amazon is already using the crowd delivery but they have limited themselves to cars, tapping into a more efficient network of people. We are seeing that there are more tools available for planning of more cycling such as the Propensity to Cycle Tool to support public investments in cycling infrastructure. We see rise of electric cargo bikes with changes regulation in classification of electric assisted bikes in 2015. And increasing range of electric vehicles such as Vmoto electric scooters.
All points to a logistics infrastructure that is changing towards a more sustainable and cheaper way of moving things. As consumers, when we are aware that we have options for more sustainable choices of how things are shipped, we can help drive a greater demand.
So let us know what you think of the clean crowd shipping market? Are there any new exciting service you have encountered or used?
If you have missed the previous post in this series, head back to read here:
Day 1 of XMas — Food Waste Apps
Day 2 of XMas — Air Quality Apps
Day 3 of XMas — Transport Services
Day 4 of XMas — Electric Vehicles
For more about IYWTo head over to here or get in touch with Woon at woon@iywto.com
This series is written in collaboration with the 6heads community. 6heads is dedicated to shared learning at the join of sustainability and innovation.
