Management of Public Transportation Demand and Maximization of Operator Revenues using Car Sharing as a Supplement to Public Transport Systems

Public Transport (PT) systems of a region serve as key players in satisfying the mobility needs of people. Nevertheless, the rapid urbanization and population growth increases the pressure on existing PT infrastructure in terms of effectively meeting additional passenger demand and a failure in this goal will result into users’ shift to their private vehicles with consequent worsening of the congestion problems along with other environmental impacts. In this framework, it has been observed that providing more and more PT options, is not always a viable solution due to limited street space and large investments required for their operations. To tackle with this issue, shared mobility services such as car sharing, ride sharing, and other micro mobility services have proved to be a feasible solution.Considering these facts, this paper is focused on the design of Car Sharing (CS) systems as a supplement to PT to attract the additional demand for PT systems of a region. To do so, an optimization model is stated as Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model, aiming at minimizing the unserved demand for PT in each zone but maximizing, at the same time, the operator’s revenues. The effectiveness of the proposed mathematical model is supported using a numerical example.