Name: Analysis of reservation changes for a carsharing service in Greater Montreal
Start: 2025-05-28T09:30:00-0400
End: 2025-05-28T09:50:00-0400

Welcome to CTRF’s 60th Annual Conference! Enjoy Ottawa

Wednesday May 28, 2025 9:30am - 9:50am EDT

Desmarais 1160

Enhancing shared mobility can enable carsharing companies to optimise their services, improve user experiences, and increase adoption rates. Research on carsharing also informs urban planning and policy development. The adoption of carsharing services can help alleviate traffic congestion, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and address the challenges of limited parking in urban areas by providing viable alternatives to personal vehicle use. This research, which primarily focuses on station-based system, aims to understand how people use carsharing reservation systems. These insights are essential for improving carsharing services. Communauto, Canada's largest carsharing company, has users who frequently modify their reservations, occasionally causing logistical challenges. Using the company's reservation database and R software, statistical analyses link social and temporal variables"”such as modification dates, number of modifications, age, gender, day of the week, and time of day"”to observed behaviours. One notable finding is the phenomenon of "fake cancellations," where 41% of cancelled reservations lead to another honoured reservation on the same day. To identify the key variables that determine whether a reservation will be cancelled or honoured, a decision tree has been constructed. Based on these findings, recommendations will be developed to minimise reservation modifications.

Speakers

Martin Trépanier

Full Professor, Polytechnique Montréal and CIRRELT

Martin Trépanier is a civil engineer and professor at the department of mathematics and industrial engineering of École Polytechnique de Montréal, an engineering school affiliated to the Université de Montréal. He is the titular of the Chair in the transformation of transportation... Read More →