(Un)Easy Riders: The real-world potential of integrating carpooling into digital travel planners

Digital travel planners offering inter-modal mobility solutions that combine public transport and carpooling services could help reduce car dependency affecting many Western countries, and may be particularly beneficial within Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) platforms. However, policy-makers lack evidence on their actual capability to support the transition from car dependency and recommendations to enhance their potential impact. We fill this gap, providing empirical evidence on the real-life use of an app-based travel planner that has public transport as its backbone and exploits carpooling ride offers by its users and shared active mobility services as opportunities to extend public transport network. The platform was made freely available in three Swiss regions for a one-year long trial between 2023 and 2024, and used by 624 volunteers. We analyse how it was used and by whom, by accessing automatic in-app data (N = 654), running a survey at the start of app use (n = 160), and performing semi-structured interviews with app users (n = 11). Relevant policy-findings indicate that the platform was unable to practically deliver novel inter-modal mobility services, due to insufficient carpooling ride offers by its users. Despite peer-to-peer feedback, in-app chatting features, notifications, and even monetary incentives, it did not raise the needed “critical mass” of carpooling offers. To produce tangible mobility impact and support the needed social change, we provide the following policy recommendations for future initiatives: (i) prioritise community building activities, rather than technology development aspects; (ii) leverage pre-existing, real-life communities; and (iii) rely on already existing apps already counting on a large community of users.