Evaluación de una plataforma de carpooling mediante experimentos de selección

Abstract

The city of Buenos Aires, as other large metropolis, struggles with traffic congestion in its main access routes and highways, the saturation of different transport modes, and the resulting environmental deterioration. The increasing trend in the number of motor vehicles, in addition to the steady tendency of people to live farther away from the urban centers have aggravated this problem. Carpooling of individuals making similar routes can contribute to solve this problem, by complementing transit with the flexibility and comfort of a private motor vehicle.

In this article we analyze the interest among Buenos Aires city habitants for a carpooling system based on a social network, materialized through an online platform that allows car drivers and riders that share similar routes to meet and to get to an agreement about the economic aspects of the trip. Neither professional drivers nor a commercial enterprise is required for the system to operate. As an incentive for drivers to subscribe to the carpooling system, a high occupancy vehicle lane in the main access highways of the city is proposed. The empirical validation has been carried out by means of a discrete choice experiment in which the carpooling alternative competes with existing transport modes. Variation in travel time and cost for each alternative are proposed through different scenarios which are distributed via an on-line instrument to a representative sample of people living in multiple suburban neighborhoods in the metropolitan area of Buenos Aires. Discrete choice models are used to analyze the data gathered in the experiment to calculate the supply and demand curves and evaluate the economic and operating viability of the system.