Why do (or don’t) people carpool for long distance trips? A discrete choice experiment in France

Abstract

Long-distance carpooling is an emerging mode in France and Europe, but little is known about monetary values of this mode attributes in transport economics. We conducted a discrete choice experiment to identify and measure the values of attributes of long-distance transport modes for a trip as a driver and as a passenger, with a special focus on carpooling. Around 1.700 French individuals have been surveyed.We use discrete mixed logit models to estimate the probability of mode choice. We find that the value of travel time for a driver who carpools is on average 13% higher than the value of travel time when driving alone in his/her car. The average value of travel time for a carpool trip as passenger is around 26 euros per hour, 60% higher than for a train trip and 20% higher than for a bus trip. Moreover, our study confirms a strong preference for driving solo over taking carpoolers in one's car. We also show that individuals traveling as carpool passenger incur a "discomfort" cost of on average 4.5 euros per extra passenger in the same vehicle. Finally, we identify robust socio-economic effects affecting the probability of carpooling, especially gender effects. When they drive a car, females are less likely to carpool than male, but they prefer to carpool two passengers over only one passenger.

Mobility choices and climate change: Assessing the effects of social norms, emissions information and economic incentives

“…buses) in order to emit less CO 2 (notice also there was also an injunction to travel since the wording was "Imagine you have decided to go on holiday…"). This increase in VTTS is also observed in another context, for drivers who accept money to get carpool passengers onboard (Monchambert, 2020). The higher values of WTA when compared to willingness to pay (WTP) ones, as conventionally measured with the previously quoted revealed VTTS, is well documented both on theoretical and empirical grounds on a wide variety of goods (see Horowitz and McConnell, 2002).…”

Carpooling Platforms as Smart City Projects: A Bibliometric Analysis and Systematic Literature Review

“…The green cluster includes sources that focus on issues related to policymaking, project preparation and evaluation, and day-today management of transport systems. The "Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice" participates with [27,28], which deal with the effectiveness of high-occupancy vehicle lanes and the reasons why people participate or not in carpooling, respectively.…”

“…In fact, it is identified that punishments are more effective than incentives in carpooling, however, they are not politically preferred Many subsequent studies analyze the demographic characteristics of carpoolers. It is identified that gender is an important factor, as males tend to carpool more, while females when they drive a car are less likely to carpool than males, but they prefer to carpool with two passengers over only one passenger [28]. Age, income, and education had been identified in older studies as important factors, since younger people, people with lower income, and people with lower education tended to carpool more.…”

The Future and Sustainability of Carpooling Practices. An Identification of Research Challenges

“…As shown by the size of our corpus and the two most recent meta-analyses on the topic [7,18], carpooling has long been a topic of numerous academic studies during the last decade. Our analysis of the main research topics underlines that many of the selected papers have investigated the profile of carpoolers [29][30][31][32]-or, more often, people expressing an intention to carpool [1,[33][34][35][36]]-compared to non-carpoolers, and their main motivations to practice carpooling [13,37]. Findings revealed that psychological dimensions, such as attitude towards carpooling, enjoyment of being sociable, trust in other people, environmentalist identity and the role of the family circle and peer group, are more influential than classical socio-demographic, economic and spatial variables [38][39][40][41][42].…”