Impacts of carpooling on trip costs under car-following model

Carpooling can relieve the traffic congestion, so it has been enforced in many countries. However, little effort has been made to study the impacts of carpooling on the commuting problem from the car-following model. In this paper, we apply a generalized car-following model to study each commuter's trip cost and the corresponding total cost in a traffic corridor when carpooling is allowed. The numerical result show that carpooling has some prominent positive influences on the commuting problem (i.e., each commuter's trip cost is reduced) and that the influences are directly dependent on the size of carpooling and each commuter's time headway at the origin. The results indicate that carpooling can be used to relieve the traffic congestion.