Abstract
How should public transit agencies deliver mobility services in the era of shared mobility? Previous literature recommends that transit agencies actively build partnerships with mobility service companies from the private sector, yet public transit agencies are still in search of a solid empirical basis to help envision the consequences of doing so. This paper presents an effort to fill this gap by studying a recent experiment of shared mobility public–private partnership, the carpool incentive fund program launched by King County Metro in the Seattle region. This program offers monetary incentives for participants who commute using a dynamic app-based carpooling service. Through descriptive analysis and a series of logistic regression models, we find that the monetary incentive to encourage the use of app-based carpooling generates some promising outcomes while having distinctive limitations. In particular, it facilitates the growth of carpooling by making carpooling a competitive commuting option for long-distance commuters. Moreover, our evidence suggests that the newly generated carpooling trips mostly substitute single-occupancy vehicles, thus contributing to a reduction of regional VMT. The empirical results of this research will not only help King County Metro devise its future policies but also highlight an appealing alternative for other transit agencies in designing an integrated urban transportation system in the era of shared mobility.
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Note The data is collected by asking the survey questions “before you started using Scoop, how frequently did you commute using the following types of transportation in a typical month?” and “after you started using Scoop, how frequently did you commute using the following types of transportation in a typical month?” (The original survey offers four choice options: almost every commute trip, more than half of my commute trips, less than half of my commute trips, and never. For readability, we visualize the number of responses to the first two choices.)
Note The data is collected by asking the survey question “How has the average $2 incentive provided by King County Metro on your Scoop trip changed your commuting behavior?”
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Notes
The amount of incentive for each carpooling trip = (up to $2) * (driver + number of riders). All drivers and most of the riders received $2, while a small proportion of riders received $1 (mean = $1.87).
We also tested an ordinal logistic regression model, and the estimated results are consistent. We choose to present the multinomial logistic regression here because the proportional odds assumption for the ordinal model may not be met, and besides, multinomial logistic regression tells us a much richer story.
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Acknowledgements
We thank King County Metro for providing data that were essential for this research. We thank Feiyang Sun, currently a PhD candidate at the University of Washington, Lucien Ong, who worked as an intern at King County Metro, and Charlie Knuth, who was Head of Market Research, Scoop Technologies, Inc., for their helpful comments on the initial draft of the report.
Funding
This work has been funded by the US Department of Transportation’s University Transportation Center program, Grant #69A3551747110 through the Pacific Northwest Regional University Transportation Center (PacTrans). The authors would like to thank PacTrans for their support.
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Q.S., Y.W., C.G.: Conceptualization, Q.S., C.G.: Funding acquisition, Q.S., Y.W., C.G.: Data curation, Q.S., Y.W.: Software, Q.S., Y.W.: Methodology, Q.S., Y.W.: Formal analysis and investigation, Q.S., Y.W.: Writing—Original Draft, Q.S., Y.W., C.G.: Writing—Review & Editing, Y.W.: Visualization, Q.S., Y.W.: Project administration, Q.S.: Supervision.
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Shen, Q., Wang, Y. & Gifford, C. Exploring partnership between transit agency and shared mobility company: an incentive program for app-based carpooling. Transportation 48, 2585–2603 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-020-10140-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-020-10140-w