A Comparison of Three Ridesharing Cost Savings Allocation Schemes Based on the Number of Acceptable Shared Rides

Fu-Shiung Hsieh

doi:10.3390/en14216931

Abstract

Shared mobility based on cars refers to a transportation mode in which travelers/drivers share vehicles to reduce the cost of the journey, emissions, air pollution and parking demands. Cost savings provide a strong incentive for the shared mobility mode. As cost savings are due to cooperation of the stakeholders in shared mobility systems, they should be properly divided and allocated to relevant participants. Improper allocation of cost savings will lead to dissatisfaction of drivers/passengers and hinder acceptance of the shared mobility mode. In practice, several schemes based on proportional methods to allocate cost savings have been proposed in shared mobility systems. However, there is neither a guideline for selecting these proportional methods nor a comparative study on effectiveness of these proportional methods. Although shared mobility has attracted much attention in the research community, there is still a lack of study of the influence of cost saving allocation schemes on performance of shared mobility systems. Motivated by deficiencies of existing studies, this paper aims to compare three proportional cost savings allocation schemes by analyzing their performance in terms of the numbers of acceptable rides under different schemes. We focus on ridesharing based on cars in this study. The main contribution is to develop theory based on our analysis to characterize the performance under different schemes to provide a guideline for selecting these proportional methods. The theory developed is verified by conducting experiments based on real geographical data.

Highlights

Energy consumption and the associated impact on the environment due to urbanization and growth of population are two challenges directly linking to sustainability of cities that have attracted researchers’ attention for decades
Shared mobility is a transportation mode motivated by sharing vehicles to reduce the cost of journey, fuel consumption, emissions and air pollution
The issue to allocate cost savings among stakeholders is often done by applying proportional methods such as the Fifty-Fifty Scheme, Local Proportional Scheme and Global Proportional

Summary

Introduction

Energy consumption and the associated impact on the environment due to urbanization and growth of population are two challenges directly linking to sustainability of cities that have attracted researchers’ attention for decades. The transportation sector contributes to a large part of energy consumption and the study on green transportation and solutions has become an important research subject for the sustainable development of sharing economy [3]. In the past years, shared mobility emerges as a popular transportation mode that attracts the attention of researchers as well as practitioners in the transportation sector [4]. Shared mobility refers to a transportation mode in which travelers/drivers share vehicles to reduce the cost of the journey, energy consumption, emissions, air pollution and parking demands. It takes different forms in the world, including ridesharing, carpooling and bike sharing [5,6]. Shared mobility services enable users to access transportation services conveniently on an as-needed basis

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