Modeling the effects of additional crowd-sourced delivery service on transportation mode choice in mobility-as-a-service

• Crowd-Sourced Delivery (CSD) has been integrated as an additional service within the MaaS framework. • We examine how travelers’ decisions to become crowd-shippers within MaaS framework influence their transportation mode choices. • CSD impacts the travel behavior of a small portion of travelers in terms of changing their transportation modes. • While car-based transport is generally preferred for parcel delivery, various factors can incentivize the adoption of sustainable transport. This paper investigates the impact of people’s decision to be a crowd-shipper within Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) on their transportation mode choice. Leveraging the unique characteristics of MaaS as a comprehensive mobility service platform, we propose embedding Crowd-Sourced Delivery (CSD) as an additional service. This integrated service not only allows travelers to choose a transportation mode but also provides the option to accept (or decline) parcel delivery tasks during their journeys. Given the aim of MaaS to promote the use of sustainable transportation modes and replacement of car-based transport, we designed a stated choice experiment to capture respondents’ choices of transportation modes with and without the additional CSD service. This approach enables us to explore whether being a crowd-shipper has an impact on transportation mode choice. A random parameter mixed logit model was estimated to identify the effects of various factors. The results reveal that car-based transport is generally preferred for delivering parcels. Despite this preference, which contradicts the aim of MaaS, several factors can encourage the use of sustainable transportation modes, including public and active transport, within integrated CSD and MaaS. The parcels not being fragile, less strict delivery time window, and higher monetary incentives for using sustainable transport in CSD are among those factors. Additionally, travel contexts such as travel distance and weather, as well as the age of respondents, also influence the transportation mode choice decision once a parcel delivery task is accepted. These insights offer valuable information for policymakers and service operators to promote the use of sustainable transportation modes within CSD.