Car sharing Nokia Research has published a short paper by Stephan Hartwig and Michael Buchmann on how mobile communication services can become a next generation ride-sharing tool, with a potential to mitigate traffic- and emission problems in the 21st century.

There are 500+ million privately owned passenger cars worldwide, thereof 236 million in the US. These cars travel in the magnitude of 5 trillion km per year. Let’s assume 2 empty seats per car and a small hypothetical value of only 5 cent per km and per seat, the potential value of empty travelling seats amounts to 500 billion €.

The memo points out that current low popularity of car pooling results from technical constraints rather than lack of attractiveness of ride-sharing as such, and explores how mobile communication services can cross-link supply and demand of these empty seats.

Download paper (pdf, 363 kb, 11 pages)