Altruistic Ride Sharing: A Community-Driven Approach to Short-Distance Mobility

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2510.13227v1
• Date: Wed, 15 Oct 2025 07:24:48 GMT
• Title: Altruistic Ride Sharing: A Community-Driven Approach to Short-Distance Mobility
• Authors: Divyanshu Singh, Ashman Mehra, Snehanshu Saha, Santonu Sarkar,
• Abstract summary: Altruistic Ride-Sharing (ARS) is a decentralized, peer-to-peer mobility framework where participants alternate between driver and rider roles based on altruism points rather than monetary incentives.<n>ARS reduces travel distance and emissions, increases vehicle utilization, and promotes equitable participation compared to both no-sharing and optimization-based baselines.<n>Results establish ARS as a scalable, community-driven alternative to conventional ride-sharing, aligning individual behavior with collective urban sustainability goals.
• Score: 3.936187569159195
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Urban mobility faces persistent challenges of congestion and fuel consumption, specifically when people choose a private, point-to-point commute option. Profit-driven ride-sharing platforms prioritize revenue over fairness and sustainability. This paper introduces Altruistic Ride-Sharing (ARS), a decentralized, peer-to-peer mobility framework where participants alternate between driver and rider roles based on altruism points rather than monetary incentives. The system integrates multi-agent reinforcement learning (MADDPG) for dynamic ride-matching, game-theoretic equilibrium guarantees for fairness, and a population model to sustain long-term balance. Using real-world New York City taxi data, we demonstrate that ARS reduces travel distance and emissions, increases vehicle utilization, and promotes equitable participation compared to both no-sharing and optimization-based baselines. These results establish ARS as a scalable, community-driven alternative to conventional ride-sharing, aligning individual behavior with collective urban sustainability goals.

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