GO!Caronas: Fostering ridesharing with online social network, candidates clustering and ride matching

The larger amount of motor vehicles produces many problems to cities around the world as poor urban mobility, environment concerns and people's health. The encouragement to use alternative means of transport, such as bicycles or subways is one of the steps to solve the problem. Another way is to encouraging the optimal usage of private automobiles. In Brazil, for instance, several studies show an underused space in cars and great potential for the use of carpooling and car sharing. Unfortunately, there is not such a unified technological mean to properly support these alternatives. In this paper we extend a carpooling social network with ridematching functionality in order to enable real-time ridematching. Furthermore, we implemented a functionality of group formation to encourage people to offer or get regular rides. We show that there is a favorable context to share rides between users. We describe the architecture of the system and implementation details. We present results about system's profiling and present a comparison of results related with acceptability of getting or offering ride between the years 2013 and 2015.