Improving Urban Sustainability of Transportation System with Shared Mobility

Abstract

The current transportation sector in the United States is heavily relied on private automobile, consuming a large amount of fuel energy and producing a large quantity of greenhouse gases. Shared mobility, such as ridesharing and bikesharing, could potentially improve urban sustainability by decreasing the total vehicle-miles, saving fuel energy and reducing greenhouse gases. This research project utilized the real-world private vehicle trajectory data of the City of the Ann Arbor, identified the potential bike trips and sharable vehicle trips, and applied optimization model to obtain the sharing scenario with the maximum vehicle-miles avoidance. The results indicate that 1.06% of total-vehicle miles can be reduced by shared mobility, including 3,799 vehicle trips that could be replaced by bike trips. Shared mobility could reduce multiple types of tailpipe gas emissions (e.g., 536 tons of CO2). Although the sharing potential is low based on the results, it might be due to the limited vehicle data and the irregular travelling pattern of private vehicles. The ridesharing potential is sensitive to the passenger’s time tolerance for dour of their trips and the number of potential bike trips is sensitive to the acceptable distance from trips’ origins and destinations to the shared bike stations. Policies and incentives to encourage longer time tolerance for ridesharing. Also, more shared bike stations could be built in the future.