Car2work: A shared mobility concept to connect commuters with workplaces
Robert Regué
Over the last decade there has been a surge of short-term rental schemes such as ZipCar, Car2go or Drive Now, among others. Furthermore, ride hailing apps such as Lyft, Uber or SideCar are becoming more popular. These new mobility concepts are focused on improving mobility in urban areas, with rather large population densities, providing an alternative to public transit and private cars. However, these concepts often fail to serve the regular transit commuter in sprawled areas that need a ride to/from transit hubs. Car2Work is a concept that intends to address this issue. Car2Work is a clean hybrid system falling between a traditional vanpool and a carsharing system, leveraging the advantages of both: commuters, if the system matches them, have a ride home guaranteed, and the vehicles are shared in a short-term rental fashion while idling on the stations.
In this work, we have modeled the system under a simulation framework that at its core relies on a variation of the multi-hop peer-to-peer ride-matching problem. Commuters announce their trips and the model finds the optimal schedule, including transit connections. A variety of scenarios can be modeled, including the use of autonomous vehicles, different fleet splits, multiple transit modes, or varying commuter preferences. The impacts of a wide-scale deployment can also be modeled; for example, in assessing the impacts on the current transportation network of a Car2Work implementation along the Metrolink Inland Empire Orange County (IEOC) line.
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