Quantifying the potential of ride-sharing using call description records

Ride-sharing on the daily home-work-home commute can help individuals save on gasoline and other car-related costs, while at the same time reducing traffic and pollution in the city. Work in this area has typically focused on technology, usability, security, and legal issues. However, the success of any ride-sharing technology relies on the implicit assumption that human mobility patterns and city layouts exhibit enough route overlap to allow for ride-sharing on the first place. In this paper we validate this assumption using mobility data extracted from city-wide Call Description Records (CDRs) from the city of Madrid. We derive an upper bound on the effectiveness of ride-sharing by making the simplifying assumption that any commuter can share a ride with any other as long as their routes overlap. We show that simple ride-sharing among people having neighboring home and work locations can reduce the number of cars in the city at the expense of a relatively short detour to pick up/drop off passengers; e.g., for a 0.6 km detour, there is a 52% reduction in the number of cars. Smartphone technology enables additional passengers to be picked up along the way, which can further reduce the number of cars, as much as 67%.