Sociotechnical support for Ride Sharing
Resnick, P. SocioTechnical support for ride sharing. In Working Notes of the Symposium on Crossing Disciplinary Boundaries in the Urban and Regional Contex (UTEP- 03) (2006).
This paper lists barriers to dynamic carpooling adoption and possible actions to reduce them. It reports about High Occupancy Vehicles (HOV) lane - which are lanes dedicated for people doing carpooling - on streets of San Francisco and Oakland and complains that there should be no fees on bridges for HOVs. The author suggests conventions developed between drivers and passengers (e.g. pickup points near public transportation stops). Regarding security, the paper suggests to give priority to female passengers, to not leave them alone waiting for a ride. The paper reports that there are no stories about rape, kidnapping or murder and the most common reported problem is bad driving. There are suggestions on needed research:
- Need of location-aware devices, because dynamic carpooling is actually limited to fixed pickups and drop-off locations.
- Simple user interfaces for passengers and drivers.
- Routing matching algorithms: short window of opportunity to match passenger and driver.
- Time-to-pickup algorithms: to help passenger decide whether to use carpooling or Public Transportation System.
- Safety and reputation system design: authenticate passenger and driver before making the match, monitor arrival at destination, feedback system.
The paper discusses about social capital impacts: there is the potential for creating new social connections and also matching drivers and passengers according to their profiles creates bridging across class, race and religious views.
Pilot Tests of Dynamic Ridesharing
Kirshner, D. Pilot Tests of Dynamic Ridesharing. Technical report (2006), http://www.ridenow.org/ridenow_summary.html
The author presents three pilot tests done in the USA, all of them failed. The reasons of failure are the following:
- Too complicated rules and user interface
- Too weak marketing effort
- Too few users. After 1 month, 1000 flyers distributed to the public and a proposed discount on parking, only 12 users were using the system.
The paper adds the idea of saving money when parking. It also enforces the idea of using social networks to allow car pooling on the fly. The author envisions using a web – and mobile service, also introducing some interesting user stories.
The smart Jitney: Rapid, Realistic Transport
Murphy, P.: The smart jitney: Rapid, realistic transport. New Solutions Journal (4) (2007)
The paper focuses on environmental benefits of dynamic carpooling. It asserts that dynamic carpooling would lower greenhouse gas emissions in a better way than electric/hydrogen/hybrid cars would do. It introduces the idea of Smart Jitney: an unlicensed car driving on a defined route according to a schedule.
The author suggests the installation of Auto Event Recorders on cars, enforcing security. It complains that challenges are all focused in convincing the population to use the service, proposing a cooperative public development of the system.
Auction negotiation for mobile Rideshare service
Abdel-Naby, S., Fante, S.: Auctions negotiation for mobile rideshare service. In Proc. IEEE Second International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Applications (2007)
The paper proposes the use of agent-based systems powered auction mechanisms for driver-passenger matching.
Casual Carpooling - enhanced
Kelley, K. L. Casual Carpooling-Enhanced. Journal of Public Transportation 10, 4 (2007), 119.
The author considers areas without HOV lanes and proposes the use of Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) chips to quickly identify passengers and drivers. Readers should be installed at common pick-up points. The paper complains that it would cost less to pay passengers and drivers for using the service than to build a HOV lane.
Empty seats travelling
Hartwig, S., Buchmann, M.: Empty seats traveling: Next-generation ridesharing and its potential to mitigate traffic and emission problems in the 21st century. Technical report, Nokia (2007),http://research.nokia.com/tr/NRC-TR-2007-003.pdf
This white paper by Nokia suggests to use the phone as a mean of transportation, creating a value in terms of a transport opportunity. It points out some factors limiting static carpooling, arranged via websites:
- Trip arrangements are not ad hoc
- It is impossible to arrange trips to head home from work or to drive shopping.
The paper notices that people are not widely encouraged to practice carpooling by local governments. It collects obstacles and success factors in terms of human sentences, and their solution. The authors say that the challenge is in the definition of a path leading from existing ride share services to a fully automated system.
Interactive systems for real time dynamic multi hop carpooling
Gruebele, P.A., Interactive System for Real Time Dynamic Multi-hop Carpooling. Global Transport Knowledge Partnership (2008).
The author proposes a dynamic multi-hop system, by dividing a passenger route into smaller segments being part of other trips. The author claims that the problems of static carpooling are that matching drivers and passengers based on their destinations limits the number of possible rides, and with high waiting times. Carpooling is static and does not adapt itself well to ad hoc traveling. The paper asks governments to integrate carpooling in laws and to push for its use. The author complains that the perceived quality of service is increased even driving the passenger away from destination: a driver and a passenger should not be matched only if they share the same or similar destination because perfect matching would require high waiting times.
The paper also addresses social aspects: in a single trip with 3 hops a passenger might meet 3 to 10 people, therefore passengers may be socially matched. It suggests to link the application with some social networks like Facebook, MySpace and use profile information to match drivers and passengers.
As security improvement, the paper suggests: the use of finger-prints, RFID, voice signature, display the location of vehicles on a map, using user pictures, assigning random numbers to be used as passwords.
Instant Social Ride Sharing
Gruebele, P.A., Interactive System for Real Time Dynamic Multi-hop Carpooling. Global Transport Knowledge Partnership (2008).
The paper proposes matching methodologies based on both a minimization of detours and the maximization of social connections. It assumes the existence of a social network data source in which users are connected by means of groups, interests, etc. In such a network, the number of relatively short paths between a driver and a passenger indicates the strength of their social connection.
It provides algorithms and SQL queries. The authors assume that there is already a large scale of users, and no barriers to adoption are taken into account.
Combining Ridesharing & Social Networks
Wessels, R. Combining Ridesharing & Social Networks. Technical report (2009), http://www.aida.utwente.nl/education/ITS2-RW-Pooll.pdf
The author envisions a mobile and web system that interacts with social networks profiles that should improve security and trust by users. Users can register to the system in a traditional way (e.g., by giving email, username, password), then complete their profiles by linking their accounts to multiple existing social networks account, to fill the remaining fields. Otherwise, they have to fill the fields manually and verify their identity in more classical ways. The paper proposes Opensocial as connection interface. An own rating system is also complained, which keeps scores of persons. Amongst the criteria are factors like reliability, safety and friendliness.
It suggests the use of mobile systems, that should make use of GPS and creation of a match on the fly (real-time algorithms). The paper provides some results of surveys: people are willing to loose 23% more time to pickup a friend of their social network rather than a stranger (6%). It also provides a high-level description of the system and implementation details.
The author asks for extra research on psychological factors that increase trust and perceived safety.
SafeRide: Reducing Single Occupancy Vehicles
Morris, J. et. al. SafeRide: Reducing Single Occupancy Vehicles. Technical report (2008), http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jhm/SafeRide.pdf
The publication is about a project in the U.S.A. It reports that there is a market-formation problem: to achieve the system that attracts passengers, there will have to be many drivers available. But the drivers will emerge only when it appears profitable or otherwise desiderable, and that depends on there being many passengers, etc. The author complains that someone must discover a winning formula before anyone will invest.
The paper lists some interesting user stories, as well as algorithms and requirements.
Current Trends in Dynamic Ridesharing, identification of Bottleneck Problems and Propositions of Solutions
Zimmermann, H., and Stempfel, Y. Current Trends in Dynamic Ridesharing, identification of Bottleneck Problems and Propositions of Solution. Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India. (2008),_Dynamic_Ridesharing.PDF
This paper reports a state of the art of dynamic carpooling. The authors review several papers about the topic and some applications. We used this publication as a base for identifying problematics and to avoid duplication of work. The authors also identify barriers against the adoption of dynamic carpooling systems and propose solutions. In our comparative analysis, presented in Section 3, we report different proposals than those presented in this paper. Our proposals are complementary to those reported by this paper and are more focused in technological aspects.