Location- and time-dependent meeting point recommendations for shared interurban rides

Abstract

Drivers offering spare seats in their vehicles on long-distance (interurban) trips often have to pick up or drop off passengers in cities en route. In that case, it is necessary to agree on a meeting point. Often, this is done by proposing well-known locations like train stations, which frequently induces unnecessary detours through the inner-city districts. In contrast, meeting points in the vicinity of motorways and arterial roads with good public transport connection can reduce driving time and mileage. This work proposes a location-based approach to enable a fast and automatic recommendation of suitable pick up (and drop off) points for drivers and passengers using a GIS workflow and comprehensive precomputation of travel times.

Keywords:

• Ride-sharing
• meeting points
• routing
• recommender system
• GIS

Acknowledgements

This research has been supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the Research Training Group SocialCars (GRK 1931). The focus of the SocialCars Research Training Group is on significantly improving the city’s future road traffic, through cooperative approaches. This support is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

1 http://www.blablacar.com.

2 http://www.liftshare.com.

3 http://www.verkehr-bs.de/.

4 http://www.opentripplanner.org/.

5 http://www.openstreetmap.org/.

6 http://www.connect-fahrplanauskunft.de.

7 www.braunschweig.de/leben/stadtplanung_bauen/geoinformationen/geoinformationen.html.

8 NumPy is Python library (http://www.numpy.org/).

Additional information

Funding

This research has been supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the Research Training Group SocialCars [GRK 1931].