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Title:

Complement or Competitior? Comparing car2go and Transit Travel Times, Prices, and Usage Patterns in Seattle

Accession Number:

01626423

Record Type:

Component

Abstract:

This paper develops methods to identify trips taken using the free-float carsharing service car2go in Seattle, USA, and to estimate driving and walking time associated with these trips and similar trips by transit. The paper uses these methods to compare the travel time and costs of trips taken by car2go with the time and costs of taking the same trips by transit, to better understand how car2go may complement and/or compete with transit. The authors identify 237,000 car2go trips by observing available vehicles each minute from January 23 to May 10, 2016 through car2go’s application programming interface (API). The authors estimate driving times using the Google Maps API, developing a correction factor to account for temporal variation in traffic conditions, and develop a method to infer the average walking time to reach a car2go vehicle based on the locations of nearby vehicles. The authors estimate that the average car2go trip in Seattle costs $7.27 and involves 5.5 minutes of walking and 11 minutes of driving time, compared with 6 minutes walking, 13.6 minutes waiting, and 28 minutes in-vehicle time for the same trip by transit. Surprisingly, the authors find that although car2go complements transit by serving late-night trips and providing a faster but more costly alternative, it is not used disproportionately for trips where it offers especially large travel time savings compared with transit.

Supplemental Notes:

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADB40 Standing Committee on Transportation Demand Forecasting.

Monograph Accession #:

01618707

Report/Paper Numbers:

17-06234

Language:

English

Corporate Authors:

Transportation Research Board

500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001 United States

Authors:

Wang, Xiasen
MacKenzie, Don
Cui, Zhiyong

ORCID 0000-0002-5780-4312

Pagination:

19p

Publication Date:

2017

Conference:

Transportation Research Board 96th Annual Meeting

Location: Washington DC, United States
Date: 2017-1-8 to 2017-1-12
Sponsors: Transportation Research Board

Media Type:

Digital/other

Features:

Figures; Maps; References

Identifier Terms:

Car2Go; Google Maps

Geographic Terms:

Seattle (Washington)

Subject Areas:

Finance; Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation

Source Data:

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2017 Paper #17-06234

Files:

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Created Date:

Dec 8 2016 12:32PM