CarLink Success Prompts New Program

was field-tested in Northern California from January to November 1999. The ten-month public-private partnership was implemented and researched by two teams at the Institute of Transportation Studies at UC Davis. Project partners included Caltrans, PATH, American Honda Motor Company, the Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART), and UC’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL). The German-based smart carsharing technology company INVERS and Teletrac (US) provided the advanced carsharing and vehicle tracking technologies. The program featured shortterm rental vehicles, linked by advanced communication and reservation technologies to facilitate shared-vehicle access at transit and employment centers. Fifty-four people from San Francisco, Oakland, and East Bay communities enrolled, and shared twelve natural-gas powered Honda Civics. The cars were based from premium park-ing spaces at the Dublin-Pleasanton BART station, about thirty miles southeast of the UC Berkeley campus, and from LLNL, about fifteen miles (24 km) east of the BART station. CarLink Success Prompts New Program Susan Shaheen, PATH Commuter-based carsharing programs, where members share a fleet of vehicles that provide a link between home, public transit, and workplace, give commuters the benefits of both a private car and public transportation. Although driving one’s own car offers nearly unlimited flexibility at both ends of a commute, the monumental congestion endemic to today’s highways exacts a heavy toll in wasted time, stressed drivers, and polluted air. Commuting by train is practical for people who live or work near transit stations, but most rail commuters have to face the problems of getting to and from the station, and parking at it. Transit feeder shuttles— buses that run from a transit station to neighborhoods or workplaces—are increasingly popular, but are limited both in the areas they serve and the times they operate. Most are subsidized in large part by transit agencies, i.e., by taxes. Carsharing programs, with their greater temporal and geographic flexibility, can be an excellent complement to shuttles; moreover, they have the potential to become commercially viable on their own. continued on next page Research Updates in Intelligent Transportation Systems