The increase in online shopping in recent years has spurred extensive study into the travel and transport implications. For example, a number of studies have investigated the choice between store and online shopping. This choice has assorted transport implications, including personal travel to conventional stores on the one hand, and the delivery of parcels to customers on the other. However, there is an acceptance in the literature that the impact of online shopping is very complex. In particular, in the presence of online shopping, the consumer might make various choices and exhibit various behaviours that will make the net transport impact hard to quantify, including trip chaining shopping frequency, physical travel to more distant physical stores that were previously unknown, and even changes in per product and per capita spending. Single shopping trips could be fragmented into many deliveries, and conventional shopping trips with low congestion and environmental impact (e.g., walking and cycling) might be replaced by a delivery service with a larger impact. A key component of the online shopping process is the distribution of the product to the customer. The ‘last mile’ is the final leg of distribution, in which the customer takes possession of the product. A common way in which the product traverses the last mile is through conventional parcel delivery to a location of the customer’s choosing. However, conventional business-to-consumer (B2C) delivery may be unappealing to many. Failed deliveries are common. In part it stems from the frequently arbitrary nature of the delivery time, although advanced notice of delivery and the availability of delivery scheduling are making the delivery time more predictable and controllable, respectively. However, even with these improvements in service level, many households struggle to have someone available to receive the delivery, which will most likely be during business hours. These detractors act as an impediment to further uptake of online shopping, and may make conventional store shopping more attractive. Indeed, a number of studies have investigated the choice between store shopping, and online shopping with delivery. In recent years, though, a range of alternatives to conventional delivery have become available in many countries. Collection/delivery points (CDPs) are locations to which parcels can be delivered, and picked up by the customer at a more convenient time. They provide value by facilitating the exchange of goods purchased elsewhere at a convenient location, for example in proximity to the customer’s home, workplace, or a shopping locality they frequent. They also provide value by facilitating pickup at a flexible and convenient time, typically by providing extended business hours, or even 24 hour availability. The business model has been adopted in many countries, including Germany (e.g., DHL Packstation), the United Kingdom (e.g., CollectPlus) and The Netherlands. The large increase in parcel deliveries has seen a mode shift over the last mile of freight distribution from various modes of personal travel, associated with conventional shopping trips, to light commercial vehicles (LCVs), delivering (or attempting to deliver) to the customer (Mokhtarian, 2004). What we see with the advent of CDPs is a partial mode shift over the last mile from LCVs back to the various modes of personal travel. From a transport perspective, online shopping will now involve a nexus of the freight distribution task, and personal shopping travel both to pick up parcels (in support of online shopping), and for conventional shopping. In this paper, conventional parcel delivery services and CDP services will be collectively referred to as last mile services (LMSs). The introduction of CDPs and the enhancement of delivery services in recent years has provided shoppers with considerably more choice about how the products will be delivered to them. This study will investigate travel behaviour responses to the presence of these new and enhanced last mile services. (Author/publisher)
Abstract