Ridesharing: The state-of-the-art and future directions

Although ridesharing can provide a wealth of benefits, such as reduced travel costs, congestion, and consequently less pollution, there are a number of challengesthat have restricted its widespread adoption. In fact, even at a time when improving communication systems provide real-time detailed information that could be used to facilitate ridesharing, the share of work trips that use ridesharing has decreased by almost 10% in the past 30 years. In this paper we present a classification to understand the key aspects of existing ridesharing systems. The objective is to present a framework that can help identify key challengesin the widespread use of ridesharing and thus foster the development of effective formal ridesharing mechanisms that would overcome these challengesand promote massification.