Enhancing Urban Mobility Through Peer-to-Peer Ride-Sharing: A System-Wide Impact Assessment

Urban areas face increasing challenges such as traffic congestion, environmental degradation, and parking shortages, largely due to the excessive use of low-occupancy personal vehicles. This paper proposes a peer-to-peer (P2P) ride-sharing system to address these issues, focusing on optimizing transportation efficiency and evaluating its broader impacts on urban mobility. We develop a dynamic pricing model and a Penalized Column Generation algorithm to optimize rider-driver matching and fare calculations, considering travel distance, number of riders, and sharing scenarios. Using the Multi-Agent Transport Simulation (MATSim) platform, we simulate the system in Lyon, France, under various scenarios. Results indicate that the proposed system can reduce total travel distance by up to 8.0% and decrease the number of trips by 17.16% in the optimal scenario. The findings demonstrate the potential of P2P ride-sharing to reduce urban congestion and enhance transportation efficiency while maintaining fair pricing. The study shows that P2P ride-sharing can effectively address urban mobility challenges while emphasizing the importance of assessing its broader impact on urban access and transport equity, providing a deeper evaluation of sustainability beyond efficiency improvements.