Performance evaluation of a multi-station shared vehicle system

In recent years, shared vehicle systems have garnered a tremendous amount of interest as an innovative transportation paradigm which can potentially alleviate traffic congestion, improve air quality, and make surface transportation more efficient. In a multi-station configuration however, these systems place an additional burden on both users and system operators to make the system successful. Intelligent transportation technology can play a key role in making these systems user-friendly, easy to manage, and efficient. However, these systems will not necessarily succeed through the blind application of separate ITS technology bundles; there is a need to tightly integrate different types of ITS technology. Further, it is important to have quantitative performance measures to measure system efficiency. In this paper, we define various performance measures for multi-station shared vehicle systems and demonstrate their use in a real-world, intelligent shared electric vehicle system operating on the University of California-Riverside campus. This system has been set up as a "testbed" to improve our understanding of the operating details of a multi-station shared vehicle system and to identify the critical operating issues to make such systems successful.