Dynamic Ride Sharing Service: Are Users Ready to Adopt it?

Abstract

Nowadays we are experiencing a shift of paradigm from ownership of goods to sharing goods and experiences. The “sharing economy” paradigm will change the way people experience everyday life in many sectors. In this paper we are focusing on the urban transportation experience presenting a user centric design of an experimental dynamic ridesharing service for Italian users, called VirtualBus [1]. The proposed service is based on a mobile application that allows people to get arrangement in real time for sharing car rides in an urban area, both as “driver” or “passenger”. A smart matching algorithm will provide, within a short time, the best matching between the driver and the passenger learning from users’ feedbacks and improving its suggestions overtime to better fulfill users’ expectations. The service was designed, prototyped and tested involving users in every step, starting from a vision board with the target Personas. Then, a first raw prototype of the mobile application was designed and tested during specific focus group sessions. During the focus groups users highlighted both the importance of defining rewarding and payment rules and some concerns about privacy and reliability of drivers and passengers. Moreover, a large scale questionnaire, with more than 500 respondents, was distributed with the focus on two big Italian cities, Turin and Rome. The questionnaire analysis gave many interesting insights about the city commuting habits and its results were used to enrich the previously designed Personas with the aim of enhancing real users’ scenarios. Next steps will involve real users on selected cities as a test-bed of both the technical solution and the users’ acceptability of a new way of experiencing the urban commuting.