Introduction of car sharing into existing car fleets in microscopic travel demand modelling

• Published in: Personal and ubiquitous computing Vol. 21; no. 6; pp. 1055 - 1065
• Main Authors: Heinrichs, Matthias, Krajzewicz, Daniel, Cyganski, Rita, von Schmidt, Antje
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Springer London 01.12.2017; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Automobile fleets; Automobile rentals; Car sharing; Computer Science; Computer simulation; Integrated approach; Mobile Computing; Modal choice; Original Article; Parameter estimation; Personal Computing; Railroad transportation; Smartphones; Traffic models; Travel demand; Trip estimation; User Interfaces and Human Computer Interaction; Travel demand; Disaggregated cars; Agent-based modelling; Car sharing; Car fleet; Microscopic modelling
• ISSN: 1617-4909; 1617-4917
• DOI: 10.1007/s00779-017-1031-3

Microscopic travel demand models take the characteristics of every individual person of the modelled population into account for computing the travel demand for the modelled region. Car sharing is an old concept, but the combination of a car sharing fleet parked in a public space with smartphone services to find available cars nearby offers a new mobility service. It enables people to use a fleet operator’s cars by providing individual mobility on demand. However, integrating this mobility option into microscopic travel demand models still is a difficult task due to a lack of data. This paper shows an integrated approach to model car sharing as a new mode for transport within a travel demand model using disaggregated car fleets with car-specific attributes. The necessary parameters for mode choice are estimated from various surveys and integrated into an existing multinominal logit model. The proposed work is used to simulate the travel demand of a synthetic population for the German capital of Berlin. A comparison with the survey results shows that the proposed integration of car sharing meets the real-world data. Furthermore, it is shown that the mode choice reacts well for access restrictions for specific car segments and local accessibility influencing the trip lengths.