The Socio-Economic Benefits of Sharing Economy: Colleague-Based Carpooling Service in Korea

Carpooling—a concept of shared transportation for addressing traffic issues such as congestion and CO2 emissions—has been actively introduced, especially in developed countries. This study proposes a method to estimate the benefits of introducing carpooling for employees in public agencies that are transferring innovation cities. To overcome the shortcomings of previous carpooling services, a carpooling service for inter-company employees was designed and evaluated in our study. The traffic flow theory was used to estimate the direct benefits to carpooling users and the indirect benefits to express highway drivers. The results indicate that carpooling services have a significant socio-economic cost-saving effect on traffic congestion, environmental cost reduction, and so forth, and will therefore play an important role in traffic demand management.