01100428

Component

Growing urban traffic congestion requires the study of measures to reduce the number of automobiles traveling every day to the city centers. Carpooling is a system by which a person shares his private vehicle with one or more people that have similar origins and trips. In theory these systems could lead to great reductions in private vehicle trips but past experiences show different results and one of the reasons is the schedule differences between people. Because one does not know at the outset who is willing to participate on these systems or not, there is the possibility to use a simulation methodology based on census data from the commuter trips and the population characteristics in an urban area to generate random commuter trips. Those trips are then evaluated to find their grouping possibilities, through an optimization heuristic, having in consideration time and capacity constraints. Simulations were run on top of Lisbon Metropolitan Area (Portugal) and results show probabilities of finding a match consistently inferior to 50%, showing that Time-Space constraints may play an important role in determining the results that this mode has obtained in the last decades.

01084478

08-0199

English

18p

2008

Transportation Research Board 87th Annual Meeting

DVD

Figures; Maps; References (22)

Bottlenecks; Carpools; Central business districts; City planning; Commuters; Ridesharing; Traffic congestion; Traffic flow; Traffic simulation; Travel surveys; Urban transit

Lisbon (Portugal)

Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Passenger Transportation; Planning and Forecasting; Public Transportation; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning; I73: Traffic Control

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2008 Paper #08-0199

TRIS, TRB

Jan 29 2008 2:33PM