Current journey planning tools do not provide information for multi-modal journeys connecting individual and collective transport services. Often, the proposed options require multiple interchanges and result in long and convoluted journeys. SocialCar is a research and innovation action bringing together developers, social and economic scientists, transport engineers, carpooling providers and public authorities from several EU countries with the aim to enhance the public transport network by a wider variety of services including carpooling/sharing, bike sharing, taxi and other on-demand services. SocialCar developed an IT platform, made available as Open Source, providing planning, booking and payment services for multimodal trips. By developing data processing flows and algorithms, the project responded to the challenge of matching travel requests with the integrated public-private transport supply. The SocialCar innovation is twofold: technological (the potential of open data, the innovative multi-modal algorithms) and economic (novel mobility service models, public-private partnerships in the passengers' transport domain). With an Innovation Management Board, the project involved external influencers who regularly provided advice and paved the way for a market roll-out and mainstreaming of the developed solutions. The project solutions were subjected to a three-level trial in 10 European test sites. The most advanced trial level examined the potential for early adoption by end-users in 4 cities.
SocialCar main objectives are to reduce travel times and costs, to increase comfort and convenience and to contribute to a better environmental performance of urban transport networks. The achieved benefits are relating to social inclusion, service orientation for citizens, accessibility of urban areas and transport efficiency. SocialCar will alleviate traffic congestion and carbon footprint, will reduce the operating costs of individual car-poolers and will increase the share of public transport users. The research action funded by H2020 program concluded with significant scientific advancements (multimodal routing algorithms combining regular and flexible transports) and technical outputs (the journey planner application and related software platform, the study of transport environments and operating conditions for generating feasibility of an integrated multimodal system and finally the business modelling and economic assessment of the entire system) allowing full transferability of project results.
