Measuring Travel Behavior Changes to Variably Priced Carsharing Using Mobile Applications

Abstract

Carsharing programs help reduce car use and increase reliance on congestion-reducing modes, including transit, bicycling, and walking. The basic pricing model, a flat hourly rate, creates an opportunity to study variable pricing as a strategy to increase demand for carsharing, while influencing travel behavior modally, spatially, and temporally. This chatper discusses the use of a GPS-enabled mobile phone application to collect travel behavior data while changes to the hourly rental rates were administered to an experimental group of carsharing users. To assess shifts in peak-hour travel in response to variable pricing, nonparametric methods are used to estimate rental start-time probability density functions. Findings show that using pricing to influence when carsharing members take trips can serve to redirect demand to capacity travel times on the road system.