Challenges of commuter carpooling with adapting to Japanese customs and regulations: A pilot study

Abstract

Commuter carpooling is a practical transportation demand management that promotes employees picking up and dropping off co-workers during their daily work commute. The benefits include reducing carbon footprint, traffic congestion, parking needs, and transportation-related costs in urban and suburban areas since lessening the number of cars and kilometers traveled. Numerous conventional studies have highlighted the social importance and efficacy of carpooling across different countries. Nevertheless, carpooling with co-workers still requires to be developed in Japan. This paper reports on proof of concept (PoC) to verify a carpooling model’s feasibility and highlight challenges to successfully adapting carpooling to Japanese customs and regulations in practical implementation. Under two companies’ cooperation in Hiroshima, Japan, twenty employees commuted via carpooling for two weeks using a developed mobile application. We validated the need and identified five realistic challenges by analyzing the questionnaire survey and the driver’s plan-actual route reproduced from the GPS data. These challenges are to reduce waiting times, provide incentives for the driver, provide navigation with easy-to-drive route guidance and traffic avoidance, operate flexibly, and drop in on the way.