Part 1 | Carpooling — Why this, why now?
Carpooling intuitively is a silver bullet solution to beating congestion, minimising vehicular pollution, and riding affordably. Yet, the concept isn’t witnessed in an organised, at-scale manner in India. This three part series on Carpooling by OMI attempts to set the stage (Part 1), looks at the current legislative barriers (Part 2), and tries to draw from other countries on what an organised market for carpooling could look like (Part 3).
With the presence of 14 Indian cities in the 20 most polluted cities in the world, the number of news stories in the Indian press on air pollution has increased. Media coverage plays a vital role in informing the public opinion and increasing citizen demand for action on clean air program. 79% of these stories established the need for urgent action and over 50% identified vehicles as the chief source of air pollution. Research by TERI establishes that 28% of PM2.5 can be attributed to vehicular pollution. Stricter vehicular policies, therefore, may be in order. At this stage, it is important for policymakers to ask themselves, “How strict can we be”?
While policies to disincentivize users may be successful to some extent, the final choice of driving a personal vehicle still remains with the users.
O P Agarwal, from WRI, identifies comfort, safety, and flexibility as the main motivation for people to use private vehicles. He contends that in future public transport should address consumer preferences. While the government’s push towards public transport is encouraging, what can cities do with the existing cars?
According to reports by various automobile companies, vehicular sales witnessed growth despite the GST regime in FY18. Not only does it point towards a demand for safety, comfort, and flexibility, but also towards the sense of accomplishment that comes with owning a car. Such was the power of advertising that commercials with young couples, unaccompanied by parents and two-wheeler owners who aspired to buy a car instilled the slogan “Mera Sapna Meri Maruti” and “Humara Bajaj” in our populace.
With the advent of app-based mobility solutions, there has been a paradigm shift. People have now started shifting from ‘owning a vehicle’ to ‘owning a ride’.
With the shift in the attitude towards vehicle ownership, carpooling might prove useful for Indian cities. Since it would meet the demand for safety, comfort, flexibility associated with private vehicles, while at the same time ensuring asset utilization.
Carpooling, at a very fundamental level, can be understood as “an arrangement between people to make a regular journey in a single vehicle, typically with each person taking turns to drive the others.”
Carpooling may be categorized under the following heads: acquaintance-based ridesharing — where co-passengers are familiar with each other before the ride, organizational ride-sharing — where people associated with a common organization share a ride, and ad-hoc ridesharing — where drivers and passengers are matched through an app.
Not only does carpooling ease congestion and emissions, it also enables the utilisation of existing cars and reduction of monthly expenses for commuters. An algorithm developed by MIT Center for Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) conducted a case study in New York; it predicted that 98% of the demand for single vacancy vehicle (14000 cars in NY) can be met by 3000 four-passenger cars. Further, a study in Tehran found that carpooling can reduce daily morning peak hour trips from 3,900,000 to 773,748, corresponding to a fuel saving of 1,294,325 litres per day. A study in India predicted the impact of carpooling on average monthly expenditure. It proved that if a private car owner shares a ride with 3 other passengers, s/he can reduce his/her monthly vehicular expenditure by 75%.
At present, the Central Motor Vehicles Act does not legalize carpooling. Regulated by the Act, contract carriages and public service vehicles can carry passengers for ‘hire and reward’. The definition of the two, however, excludes ‘a private car which is only used occasionally for giving the lift against some payments’. Although such businesses do exist in some parts of India, there is a lack of clarity around the legality of carpooling. One might wonder, “if carpooling is so beneficial, why isn’t it incentivized, let alone be legalized?”
