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This paper presents the potential human health impacts from connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) in the San Francisco, Bay Area, U.S. The study concentrates on impacts derived from CAVs’ outcomes on travel demand, safety, and environmental emissions. The paper combines travel modeling practices, critical literature review, and the authors’ expert inference, to quantify the human health impacts using the Integrated Transport and Health Impacts Model (ITHIM). Specifically, ITHIM estimates impact considering changes in travel demand, level of physical activity, emissions, and safety features. This study estimates a 10% increase in car travel mileage and an 11% decrease in walk/bike trip mode share at the presence of CAVs; a 70%–90% crash reduction because of safer CAVs; and significant emission reduction by several CAV-enabled mechanisms such as eco-driving (over 30% CO2 emission reduction) and engine performance adjustment (over 20% CO2 emission reduction). The health impact assessments show significant opportunities for road traffic injury reductions (annual saving of more than 300 deaths and 14,000 life years). However, reduced physical activity because of the mode shift to the car could cause negative health outcomes (increased annual deaths and disability-adjusted life years (DALYs) by more than 30–60 and 700–900, respectively). A set of (active transport [AT] and vehicle electrification) scenarios were developed that could mitigate the potential health-related risks and evaluated their effectiveness. The results show enormous benefits from 50% increased travel-related physical activity which offset the CAV health drawbacks and generates additional benefits by preventing premature deaths and saving life years.

This paper contributes to the emerging body of research on crowdshipping, which is a collaborative strategy that distributes delivery tasks to a mass of actors that act as ordinary couriers, aiming at reducing delivery costs and supporting sustainability. The study focuses on last mile delivery activities, where numerous app-based delivery platforms have recently emerged. The paper provides an overview of the operational characteristics of these platforms based on an in-depth study of a sample of major crowdshipping services (state-of-practice) and a comprehensive review of the state-of-research. After comparing platform services and characteristics, we identified four core (typological) factors that differentiate services: platform (service) type, delivery type, delivery mode, and pricing strategy; and six categories for service challenges and opportunities. Moreover, the review of the state-of-research synthesized their findings with respect to the identified practical challenges to discover opportunities for future work. Overall, the study found that there is a mismatch between practical challenges and scientific solutions. The literature has not addressed all challenges identified in practice, such as couriers’ work conditions and pricing, which are still unresolved issues. The majority of articles were exploratory in nature with their findings based on hypothetical random instances. More research is needed with empirical case studies to evaluate the service net effects on each actor (e.g., senders, receivers, couriers, and platforms) in particular, and on the society in general, in terms of traffic externalities, quality of life, cost and revenue. The paper ends with a discussion of promising areas for future research.