Evaluating Carpooling Opportunities among Multimodal Options Using a Supernetwork Approach

High rates of car ownership, changes in land use patterns, the spatial sprawl of residential and job locations, and socio-demographic attributes constitute some of the major obstacles facing carpooling. Adding a number of other psychological factors, such as trust issues between anonymous people, unreliability, and lack of incentive, there is a uncertain future for most carpooling programs. Despite of the documented obstacles and barriers, carpooling remains one of the most effective approaches to remedy the worsening urban congestion if opportunities residing in the social structures can be discovered and amplified. To shed light on how to structure a more effective carpooling programs, this study explores and studies the concept of social carpooling, which aims to mitigate on the challenges of inconveniency and the psychological barriers toward carpooling. Using the supernetwork approach, this study evaluates the attractiveness of carpooling in a social network with the aim of pin pointing different ways of promoting this mode. The framework is applied to a large-scale data set that was collected from the morning rush hour commuters who traveled to The University of Arizona campus. Results show that even though 77.24% of trips cannot be switched to other modes, opportunities exist for the 22.76% of commuters to select more sustainable mobility options. Among these commuters, 13.75% can carpool with others who are also destined at the University campus.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP020 Standing Committee on Emerging and Innovative Public Transport and Technologies.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Arian, Ali
  • Chiu, Yi-Chang
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
• Date: 2017

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 17p
• Monograph Title: TRB 96th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Carpools; Mode choice; Network analysis; Social factors
• Candidate Terms: Social networking
• Identifier Terms: University of Arizona
• Geographic Terms: Tucson (Arizona)
• Subject Areas: Data and Information Technology; Highways; Planning and Forecasting;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01628220
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 17-06811
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Mar 7 2017 10:25AM