Pooling for First and Last Mile
share
Carpooling is a system in which drivers accept to add some limited detours to their habitual journeys to pick-up and drop-off other riders. Most research and operating platforms present carpooling as an alternative to fixed schedule transit and only very little work has attempted to integrate it with fixed-schedule mass transit. The aim of this paper is to showcase the benefits of such integration, under the philosophy of Mobility as a Service (MaaS), in a daily commuting scenario. We present an integrated mass transit plus carpooling system that, by design, constructs multimodal trips, including transit and carpooling legs. To this aim, the system generates vehicle detours in order to serve transit stations. We evaluate the performance of this system via simulation. We compare the “Current” System, where carpooling is an alternative to transit, to our “Integrated” System, where carpooling and transit are integrated in a single system. We show that, by doing this, the transportation accessibility greatly increases: about 40% less users remain without feasible travel options and the overall travel time decreases by about 10%. We achieve this by requiring relatively small driver detours, thanks to a better utilization vehicle routes, with drivers' vehicles driving on average with more riders on board. The simulation code is available open source.
READ FULL TEXT