The relatively new ability to rapidly transfer digital information to people as they move through cities opens up exciting possibilities for services that alleviate some of the issues that dense urban centers face. This chapter examines the potential for one such service – named FriendFreight – to reduce some of the negative effects of goods transportation in cities. FriendFreight operates through exploiting the real-time location information of people and goods and the ability for members of a community to deliver items for others while moving through the city themselves. It aims to lower the number of ‘unnecessary trips’ that people make to obtain some small goods - groceries, books, documents and dry-cleaning - and reduce what we define as travel demand in the city. However, the success of such a service relies not only on accessing real time location information but also on an understanding of how and why people might deliver goods for each other. Thus, this chapter explores two things: how incentives, trust and reciprocity can be built in services that harness digital information; and how the feasibility of a service like FriendFreight can be established given a particular real world context - Copenhagen and bicycles. Through this, the authors show that access to real-time location and movement information can open up innovative ways of tackling problems in cities from the ‘bottom-up’ but that essential to this is the nurturing of trust between users of the service. They also demonstrate that it is possible to achieve a significant reduction in travel demand through using FriendFreight for certain types of goods in the context of Copenhagen.
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