01477654

Component

It is a general trend in transportation planning to try to minimize the negative externalities of the transport system as a whole, such as noise or pollutant emissions. One of the ways to achieve this is to reduce the number of cars on the roads, for instance by increasing car occupancy. This paper focuses on evaluating the potential of this possibility. The factors influencing this potential are manifold: behavioral, structural (number of potential matches), organizational (quality of available services to meet co-travelers). In previous studies, mainly the behavioral and organizational factors were analyzed. This paper focuses on the structural factor. To do so, the highly detailed daily plans generated by the multi-agent microsimulation software MATSim are searched for potential matches. Information about the potential matches is used to assess the feasibility of carpooling. In particular, it is shown that when considering only structural factors, it is possible to group most of the car trips into two-person car-pools. The results of the analysis lead to the conclusion that there is no structural obstacle to carpooling development, and thus that the causes of the low share of this mode is to search in both the behavioral and organizational factors.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee AP020 Emerging and Innovative Public Transport and Technologies.

01470560

13-0866

English

14p

2013

Transportation Research Board 92nd Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References (17) ; Tables

Carpools; Feasibility analysis; Mode choice; Traffic simulation; Transportation modes; Travel behavior; Vehicle occupancy

Highways; Operations and Traffic Management; Safety and Human Factors; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2013 Paper #13-0866

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Feb 5 2013 12:17PM