Abstract
Some of the transportation energy consumed during peak commuter periods is wasted through slow running in congested traffic. Strategies to increase average vehicle occupancy (and reduce vehicle counts and congestion) could be expected to be at the forefront of energy conservation policies. Casual carpooling (also called “slugging”) is a system of carpooling without trip-by-trip pre-arrangement. It operates in three US cities, and has been suggested in New Zealand as a strategy for managing transportation challenges when oil prices rise. The objective of the paper is to find out if casual carpooling reduces energy consumption, and if so, how much. Energy consumption by single occupant vehicles; casual carpool vehicles; and a mix of buses and single occupant vehicles; are estimated and compared, and the impact on the rest of the traffic is calculated. The paper estimates that casual carpooling in San Francisco is conserving in the order of 1.7 to 3.5 million liters of gasoline per year, or 200-400 liters for each participant, much of which comes from the impact on the rest of the traffic. The paper concludes by calling for applied research to discover how to catalyze casual carpooling in other cities as a means of reducing transportation energy consumption.
Highlights
In Moving Cooler, An Analysis of Transportation Strategies for Reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions, carpooling is discounted as being an expensive strategy, and given little emphasis [2]
It will operate to high volume destinations on routes that are attracting lots of single occupant vehicle (SOV) drivers, and people will form fuller cars in the order they arrive at a convergence-point meeting-place [3]
It is the combination of the deadhead travel for the buses and slower travel in the general purpose (GP) lane for the SOVs that leads to the counter-intuitive result
Summary
The transportation sector is a significant user of energy. Encouragement of carpooling is one known strategy for reducing traffic that some suggest is second only to a driving ban in its potential for reducing energy use [1]. It will operate to high volume destinations on routes that are attracting lots of single occupant vehicle (SOV) drivers, and people will form fuller cars in the order they arrive at a convergence-point meeting-place [3]. Implementation of a large number of such routes would collectively make a measurable difference to the total traffic in a metropolitan area. This approach was found to resemble, to some extent, the casual carpooling systems which arose, apparently spontaneously, in Washington DC and in San Francisco, California, during the early 1970s, and had spread to Houston, Texas during the 1990s and which continue to operate successfully in all three cities. Research Board, entitled “Flexible Carpooling to Transit Stations”, developing a methodology for assessing the potential for express carpooling routes and developing an implementation proposal for one such route including estimates of the costs and benefits of such an implementation, but not including actual implementation [5]
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