From Crowdshipper Behavior to Urban Mobility Governance: Policy Insights for Sustainable Crowdshipping

Crowdshipping has recently attracted significant attention as a potentially sustainable solution for urban logistics, as it leverages individuals’ underutilized travel capacity to perform last-mile deliveries. While existing research has extensively examined crowdshipper participation through motivational patterns, considerably less attention has been devoted to the governance and policy implications emerging from crowdshipper behavior. This represents a critical gap, particularly in the context of sustainable urban mobility, where logistics innovations are often implicitly assumed to generate positive externalities without adequate regulatory design. This paper addresses this gap by translating crowdshipper motivational evidence into policy-relevant insights for sustainable urban mobility planning. The analysis is based on data collected through a structured questionnaire administered to potential and active crowdshippers. The survey collected information on socio-demographic characteristics, mobility habits, motivations, risk perception, trust, and willingness to participate under alternative crowdshipping conditions. While such conditions are commonly used to estimate participation patterns, this study reinterprets them through a governance-oriented lens to explore trade-offs between economic incentives, environmental motivations, and mobility-related impacts. Using a governance-oriented interpretation of survey data, the analysis highlights how different incentive structures activate heterogeneous crowdshipper participation patterns, with distinct mobility impacts. Results show that participation driven by strong economic incentives and operational flexibility may encourage additional vehicle-kilometers traveled, while participation embedded within routine trips and influenced by environmental considerations tends to operate within more limited spatial and temporal constraints. Taken together, these findings indicate that crowdshipping outcomes are not inherently aligned with sustainable urban mobility objectives, but critically depend on incentive design and regulatory integration within Sustainable Urban Mobility Plans (SUMPs).