Jerney: A Peer-to-Peer Shared Public Transit on Fixed Routes

This paper introduces a public transit system called Jerney, which is a peer-to-peer shared ride on fixed routes. It takes the advantage of fixed route shared public transit (such as bus and rail systems) in order to keep the fare rate down compared to taxicabs, and provide a convenience of the peer-to-peer ride (such as Uber and Lyft) over the public transit such as bus and rail systems. Jerney system consists of three main components; passenger app, driver app, and dispatch system. Passenger books a shared ride via a mobile app by specifying origin and destination locations. The dispatch system then assigns a driver to the passenger and informs the passenger with pick-up and drop-off stations. Driver location can be monitored by the passenger once the ride has been booked. Jeryney system has been evaluated with real users in a user experience study from which there were positive feedbacks from the users, as they felt that the Jerney system was useful and easy to start using.