Sending More with Less: Crowdsourcing Integrated Transportation as a New Form of Citywide Passenger-Package Delivery System

Although much effort has been devoted by both academic and industrial communities to improve the efficiency of urban passenger and package flows, current urban transport systems still fail to balance the speed and cost. To fill the gap, in this paper, we propose a novel form of transport system called crowdsourcing integrated transportation (CIT). It leverages the underused transport capacity which is generated while delivering passengers to hitchhike packages so that more transportation needs can be met with fewer vehicles and drivers (i.e., sending more with less). We identify the unique features of the new delivery system when comparing to the traditional transport systems and discuss the key research challenges and potential solutions. We further implement the passenger-occupied taxis as the package carriers and evaluate the effectiveness. With several future research directions discussed in CIT, we expect that more research interests will be stimulated in this novel transport paradigm.