Keywords

1 Introduction

Demand of mobility is changing with the increasing number of people more actively engaging themselves in economic activities. More women, people with disability and special needs are actively participating in the economic wave. Change in population demography in a city is bringing changes in commuting needs. Public transports in emerging cities like Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, are perceived unreliable and not safe due to substandard/poorly maintained vehicles, noise of vehicles, reckless driving etc. [1]. Long waiting time on road, multiple transfers, crowded vehicles and incidents like eve-teasing and harassment on fleet make them inconvenient, unsafe and uncomfortable for the passengers, especially female passengers. According to a study by Bangladesh Rehabilitation Assistance Committee (BRAC), 94% of women using public transportation in Dhaka, Bangladesh have experienced physical and verbal sexual harassment while travelling by public transportations [2]. Newly introduced ridesharing services are getting popular but are not affordable to commute to office every day. In our previous study, we introduced a new rideshare model called SSW (Social Services on Wheels) for rural communities [3]. In this paper, we propose a rideshare model for SMEs in emerging cities. Rideshare concept has been popular in a different form without using any demand-driven booking system. We propose to use ICT based rideshare management system for a community (not for an individual). In order to reduce the idle time of the vehicle and increase the revenue to be financially sustainable, multiple services are designed on SSW model. The services considered are: staff bus service, corporate errand service, car rental service for SMEs on weekdays and holiday car rental service for their employees. We carried out a survey on 315 employees in 20 SMEs to understand their mobility needs, attitude towards rideshare services, their commuting pattern including time, cost and distance. Based on their location data, available routes, we designed an experimental environment to run two cars in two different routes with two different sets of passengers. The duration of the pilot was for two months for 18 employees from different SMEs. At the end of the pilot, we surveyed on the passengers to know the mental status, time efficiency, safety issues and their desired fare for this service. The results are discussed in Sects. 4 and 5.

2 Social Services on Wheels (SSW) SME Model

The Social Services on Wheels (SSW) is designed to accommodate SME employees travel need while making it safer, more comfortable and affordable for them. The model is shown in Fig. 1 and the staff bus service pattern is shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 1.
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SSW SME elements

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Fig. 2.
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SSW SME Staff bus service

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Only providing the staff bus service creates long resource idle time, thus not generating sufficient revenue to sustain. Hence, we need to come up with new service ideas that can be operated during the idle hours. We designed two other services for SME commuting needs. One is a corporate errand shuttle bus service which multiple SMEs can use to travel to the common destinations for completing their routine errand tasks (Fig. 3). Two other services are also designed which are - a rental service for SME companies and employees during holidays and weekends for office or personal work.

Fig. 3.
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SSW SME corporate errand service

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3 Methodology of Experiment

This study was conducted in two phases. In the first phase, Survey-1 was conducted for collecting employees’ commuting pattern, mode, expense, and attitude towards using rideshare to work among 315 people from 20 SMEs located in Grameen Bank complex, in Mirpur, Dhaka, Bangladesh. In the second phase, potential routes, passengers and cars were determined based on the information collected. Two 10-seated cars served as staff buses for 18 employee participants; one car for female participants only, and the other car for both male and female participants. Survey-2 was conducted during the pilot regarding impacts of using the Staff bus service on employees work and life.

4 Findings

4.1 Employees Commuting Pattern

Commuting needs for SME employees to work are the following (1) In the morning, they arrive at the office at a fixed time at a fixed place, but need to be picked up from different locations (2) In the evening, they leave from a specified location at almost a specified time but dropped off at different location.

71% of employees arrive their workplace from 9:30 to 10:00 am in the morning (Fig. 4) and 67% of employees leave work place within 5:30 to 6:30 pm in the evening (Fig. 5).

Fig. 4.
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Arrival time to office

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Fig. 5.
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Departure time from office

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Most of the spend up to $24 USD for commuting to work a month and use bus, taxis and three-wheeler automobile vehicles to travel to work (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6.
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Monthly travel expenditure to office

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The employees use a combination of different mode of transports. Employees living within of less 3 km (56%), usually walk or take rickshaw. Rest of the employees (>3 km, <21 km) use bus, Rickshaw, bikes, motorcycle, taxis, three-wheeler taxis and other forms of informal transports. Only a few of them use private or office cars.

33.9% SME employees said that they would like to use rideshare service for commute to work and 59.1% would like to use such ride share for non-work purpose commute.

4.2 Traveling Experience with SSW

From Survey-2, it was found that participants in average reported to have 23 min extra work time and 34 min extra personal time when they traveled by SSW to work (Fig. 7).

Fig. 7.
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Incidents more frequent while using SSW Staff bus

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Participants were asked about their travel experience by SSW Staff Bus. Participants said the number of unpredicted incidents (such as losing belongings, robbery, theft), unwanted incidents (e.g. reckless driving, crowded vehicle) decreased significantly. Participants reported to remain alert the whole time while using public transports, but this phenomenon significantly decreased while using SSW Staff bus (Fig. 8).

Fig. 8.
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Incidents less frequent while using SSW Staff bus

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4.3 Operational Cost

From our estimation, it was found that a cost of $354 USD incurs for employing on 10-seated car on one route. If the car has 100% occupancy rate with 9 passengers (1 seat for the driver), it would cost approximately $1 USD a passenger per ride in average, $40 USD a month (if there is 20 working days in a month and 2 rides required a day).

5 Discussion

SME employees spend up to $24 USD for commuting to work a month. Whereas, Operational cost of SSW staff bus service is $40 USD per person, meaning that the staff bus is more expensive than existing public transports. However, using the commercial rideshare service for a similar distance would cost double or more.

Employees have a fixed time to arrive work and leave work. Majority of the participants have reported to that with SSW Staff bus service, their waiting time on road to avail a transport has decreased comparing to that for public transport. This can add up to 460 min (7.7 h) extra a month for work and 680 min (11.3 h) extra for personal work for employees.

We also found that SSW could enhance travel safety by reducing the possibility of accidents, unwanted incidents (robbery), harassment etc. to zero. Participants reported to reach in good mental status when used SSW to work.

6 Conclusion

In this paper, we talked about the need for designing a rideshare system for SME employees. We described SSW SME rideshare model. We demonstrated the findings from surveys and pilot of this model and discussed the affordability aspect and benefits of this model. Financially, using SSW Staff bus would be more expensive than using public transportations, but definitely cheaper that using the commercial rideshare services available. However, this service enhances benefits for employees by providing more time for work and personal time, increase personal safety and work productivity by providing safe and comfortable travel experience every day. Further study is required to develop the best route selection algorithm where the passengers are picked up from multiple sources but dropped off at a single point and vice versa. The same model can be used for rural areas in developed countries like Japan where people live in a small community but the population density is low.