Park and Pool Lots’ Impact on Promoting Shared Mobility and Carpooling on Highways: The Case of Slovenia

Abstract

Dispersed settlement areas (e.g., Slovenia) result in lower development of fixed public transport lines and thereby car-dependent lifestyles. To avoid congestion inside the cities and on highways in these areas, shared mobility modes e.g., carpooling, is one of the effective solutions, increasing the occupancy of personal vehicles. However, passenger pick-up and drop-off locations still remain an important challenge for carpool users and transport officials. As a collection point for carpooling, we can consider "park and pool (P+P)" lots near highways' interchanges. This study aims to examine the impacts of P+P lots near interchanges on carpooling behavior of users and on improving sustainable mobility on highways in such dispersed settlement areas. To do so, we employed a field survey, incorporated the P+P lots into the mode choice model, and examined different scenarios using the macroscopic transport model. It is found that factors such as travel cost, public transport service limitations, and improved parking facilities impact highway users' mode choice. Sixty percent of respondents are willing to leave their car in P+P lots near interchanges. The results also show that P+P lots can increase the number of carpool users. It causes remarkable savings in terms of operating and external costs because of the reduction in total distance and time travelled by personal vehicles as well as parking demand reduction in cities. At the moment, especially in Central Europe, it is easier to invest in a "demand reduction" infrastructure than to increase the capacity of infrastructure. Therefore, P+P lots could be a "win-win" situation for both users and operators.

Carpooling Systems for Commuting among Teachers: An Expert Panel Analysis of Their Barriers and Incentives

“…Some authors have studied the impacts of this fuel reduction in different countries, such as the United States of America [ 19 ], China [ 20 ], and Iran [ 21 ]. The positive environmental effects of carpooling practices are complemented with other advantages, such as improved parking facilities [ 22 ], the reduction of congestion and traffic flow, and more efficient high-occupancy lanes [ 23 ]. Other positive effects of carpooling have been identified, such as increased productivity and morality of workers, and reduced stress from shared driving responsibilities [ 24 ].…”

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“…A sustainable alternative to solo driving is carpooling, which is defined as people with similar destination and origin sharing the same car owned by one of the passengers (Shaheen & Cohen, 2019). Carpooling presents several advantages such as saving costs (Shaheen et al, 2018), availability of parking facilities (Rijavec et al, 2020), mitigation of congestion (Do & Jung, 2018), and emissions reduction (Shaheen & Cohen, 2019). Despite carpooling advantages, the practice of carpooling is not the most extended way to commute (Cohen et al, 2021).…”

Casual Carpooling: A Strategy to Support Implementation of Mobility-as-a-Service in a Developing Country

“…For this, in places where PT is inefficient and mostly insufficient (e.g., developing countries), MaaS could help to "balance the scales" with private transportation offerings, for instance, by increasing private car efficiency with casual carpooling. [5] also stated that the use of carpooling in Slovenia, can increase savings "because of the reduction in total distance and time travelled by personal vehicles as well as parking demand reduction in cities. "…”