Ride2Rail: Integrating ridesharing for attractive multimodal rail journeys

This paper presents an overview of the Ride2Rail project, enabling ‘Easy use for all’ of rail through ridesharing and carpooling as part of a multimodal journey. Ride2Rail has the overall objective of developing an innovative framework for intelligent multimodal mobility, by facilitating the efficient combination of flexible and crowdsourced transport services, such as ridesharing, with scheduled transport. The methodology for Ride2Rail covers a number of technical activities. A requirements activity has set out the travel behaviour and system requirements for the Ride2Rail project, with an emphasis on end-user requirements for shared travel services. Development activities have covered the technical implementation of Ride2Rail, involving both development of the Ride2Rail functionalities and the Ride2Rail Driver Companion application, integrated within the wider Shift2Rail ecosystem. The demonstration activity involves the preparation, implementation, execution and monitoring of Ride2Rail at four demonstration sites, each with diverse characteristics and different functionalities to be tested, to ensure flexibility of Ride2Rail solutions. Demonstrations are linked to an evaluation methodology to ensure the benefits and impacts of Ride2Rail are fully monitored and demonstrated. Current progress is reported, as are the future actions of Ride2Rail.