Can data mining help car sharing?

Mobility and congestion are critical concerns for every city, be it large or small,due to the economic and environmental challenges that they pose. Manyanalysts have advocated addressing these issues by encouraging newmultimodal services and fostering the deployment of more efficient ondemandmobility services. In this work, we focus on car sharing, a mode oftransportation that is gaining increasing popularity with its promise to reducetraffic congestion, parking demands and pollution in our cities. There are twomain classes of car sharing services: station-based car sharing or free floatingcar-sharing. In the former, shared vehicles are picked up and dropped off atdesignated (and reserved) locations within the service area, called stations. Infree floating car sharing, instead, cars can be picked up and dropped offanywhere within the service area, as long as parking is permitted at thatlocation. The two approaches have each advantages and disadvantages.Free floating car sharing offers a lot of flexibility to customers, but in citieswere finding a parking spot is troublesome, the reserved parking spaceoffered by station-based car sharing may appeal more.