Safe Route Carpooling to Avoid Accident Locations and Small-Scale Proof of Concept in Japan

Abstract

Carpooling, a transportation service that encourages employees to pick up and drop off co workers while driving to and from work, has the potential to decrease the number of private cars used to commute, eases commuter traffic congestion, and reduce CO2 emissions. Despite this potential situation of severe traffic congestion in Japan, little work has gone into developing carpooling specifically for commuting with co-workers scenarios. To build a carpooling system that accommodates Japanese unique culture and regulations, receptivity, safety, and profitability would be essential success factors. A carpooling problem (CPP) is proposed in this article with a focus on safety to discover a safe route for each driver that picks up and drops off co-workers and drives to and from their workspace while avoiding high accident-frequency locations. The CPP defines the subsets of employees sharing each car and the routes the drivers should take to optimize and minimize the total distance. Accident location data define the risk and driving competence determined by the classification of driver's license and grade of automobile insurance; then, a driver's optimal route minimizes risk while decreasing the total distance sought in deriving the CPP. The effectiveness of the proposed CPP was demonstrated by an experiment using actual accident data. This article also reports the small-scale proof-of-concept (PoC) study conducted to verify the efficacy of the proposed CPP and highlight issues with its practical application. Ten employees with five drivers and five co-workers commuted via carpooling for two weeks using a mobile application with the CPP developed independently. Through the questionnaire survey conducted after the PoC, we validated the need for carpooling. We also identified some challenges: safe map navigation, incentives for the driver, and adaptation to Japanese culture when the carpooling system is in practical use.