Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Berkeley

Shared-ride services—transportation modes that allow riders to share a ride to a common destination—include various forms of ridesharing (carpooling and vanpooling); ridesplitting and taxisplitting; and microtransit. With the proliferation of smartphones and mobile Internet, it has become more convenient to share rides. Shared-ride services are having a transformative impact on many global cities by increasing vehicle occupancy through smartphone apps. Empirical and anecdotal evidence indicates that pooling provides numerous benefits, such as reductions in energy consumption and emissions, congestion mitigation, and reduced parking infrastructure demand; however, the precise magnitude of these impacts is not well understood. Individually, shared-ride users benefit from shared travel costs, travel-time savings from high occupancy vehicle lanes, reduced commute stress, and often preferential parking and other incentives.