Mobility to Campus -- a Framework to Evaluate and Compare Different Mobility Modes

TL;DR

This paper introduces a framework to evaluate and compare the potential of new mobility modes like ridesharing and ridepooling to reduce CO2 emissions in commuter transport, demonstrated through a case study at the University of Würzburg.

Contribution

It presents a novel framework for assessing the impact of ridesharing and ridepooling on commuter emissions, applied to a real-world university case in a rural area.

Findings

Ridesharing can significantly reduce emissions depending on user willingness.

Ridepooling benefits depend on shuttle vehicle energy efficiency.

Potential emission reductions are substantial with increased user adoption.

Abstract

The transport sector accounts for about 20% of German CO2 emissions, with commuter traffic contributing a significant part. Particularly in rural areas, where public transport is inconvenient to use, private cars are a common choice for commuting and most commuters travel alone in their cars. Consolidation of some of these trips has the potential to decrease CO2 emissions and could be achieved, e.g., by offering ridesharing (commuters with similar origin-destination pairs share a car) or ridepooling (commuters are picked up by shuttle services). In this study, we present a framework to assess the potential of introducing new mobility modes like ridesharing and ridepooling for commuting towards several locations in close vicinity to each other. We test our framework on the case of student mobility to the University of W\"urzburg, a university with several campus locations and a big and rather rural catchment area, where existing public transport options are inconvenient and many students commute by car. We combine data on student home addresses and campus visitation times to create demand scenarios. In our case study, we compare the mobility modes of ridesharing and ridepooling to the base case, where students travel by car on their own. We find that ridesharing has the potential to greatly reduce emissions, depending on the percentage of students willing to use the service and their willingness to walk to the departure location. The benefit of ridepooling is less clear, materializing only if the shuttle vehicles are more energy efficient than the student cars.