Urban freight transport in the e-commerce era: a triple bottom line review

The rapid growth of e-commerce and urban freight demand necessitates innovative strategies to mitigate congestion, emissions, and costs. This review examines how stakeholders can collaboratively share urban freight transport and the associated economic, environmental, and social implications. Built on 79 previous works, the study identifies three main configurations: integrating freight with public transport, with Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) and private transport, or sharing logistics resources and infrastructure. It also proposes a modular pickup–transit–drop-off framework to compare heterogeneous collaborative delivery configurations. The analysis reveals that collaboration can improve asset utilization, reduce vehicle-kilometres travelled and emissions, and support more accessible delivery services. However, these benefits are not intrinsic to sharing and depend on urban and demand conditions, incentive structures, business-model viability, modal choices, user acceptance, equity, and appropriate governance of data and responsibilities. The literature remains strongly model- and pilot-oriented, limiting evidence on long-term and large-scale impacts. Future research should therefore prioritize comparable real-world evaluations and standardized triple bottom line indicators. Overall, collaborative urban freight represents a promising but context-dependent pathway toward more sustainable e-commerce logistics.