A Traveler Incentive Program for Promoting Community-Based Ridesharing

Traffic congestion has become a serious issue around the globe, partly owing to single-occupancy commuter trips. Ridesharing can present a suitable alternative for serving commuter trips. However, there are several important obstacles that impede ridesharing systems from becoming a viable mode of transportation, including the lack of a guarantee for a ride back home as well as the difficulty of obtaining a critical mass of participants. This paper addresses these obstacles by introducing a traveler incentive program (TIP) to promote community-based ridesharing with a ride back home guarantee among commuters. The TIP program allocates incentives to (1) directly subsidize a select set of ridesharing rides and (2) encourage a small, carefully selected set of travelers to change their travel behavior (i.e., departure or arrival times). The authors formulate the underlying ride-matching problem as a budget-constrained min-cost flow problem and present a Lagrangian relaxation-based algorithm with a worst-case optimality bound to solve large-scale instances of this problem in polynomial time. The authors further propose a polynomial-time, budget-balanced version of the problem. Numerical experiments suggest that allocating subsidies to change travel behavior is significantly more beneficial than directly subsidizing rides. Furthermore, using a flat tax rate as low as 1% can double the system's social welfare in the budget-balanced variant of the incentive program.

• Record URL:
  • https://doi.org/10.1287/trsc.2021.1121
• Availability:
  • Find a library where document is available. Order URL: http://worldcat.org/oclc/1767714
• Supplemental Notes:
  • Abstracts reprinted with permission of INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences, http://www.informs.org).
• Authors:
  • Tafreshian, Amirmahdi
  • Masoud, Neda
• Publication Date: 2022-7

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Web
• Features: References;
• Pagination: 827-847
• Serial:
  • Transportation Science
  • Volume: 56
  • Issue Number: 4
  • Publisher: Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS)
  • ISSN: 0041-1655
  • Serial URL: http://transci.journal.informs.org/

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Communities; Incentives; Promotion; Ridesharing; Subsidies; Travel behavior
• Subject Areas: Finance; Highways; Planning and Forecasting; Policy; Public Transportation;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01857527
• Record Type: Publication
• Files: TRIS
• Created Date: Sep 13 2022 9:10AM