THE ONTARIO SHARE-A-RIDE PROGRAM

The Ontario share-a-ride program is designed to achieve widespread use of car and vanpooling across the province of Ontario. The paper describes the three phases of the program: study, demonstration, and broadscale implementation. A number of preliminary results are presented from the car and vanpool demonstrations being carried out at the head office of the Ministry of Transportation and Communications. These results show a 10% and substantial cost savings for the participants in the vanpool program. A cost comparison is made between the to 20% increase in pooling activity and substantial cost savings for the participants in the vanpool program. A cost comparison is made between the total costs of operating carpools and vanpools and of providing bus service bus service in which buses ae shown to be four times and the average car five times as expensive as a vanpool. The data is used to perform a beneift analysis for creating new car and vanpools and to calculate benefit/cost ratios for the ongoing pilot projects at the Ministry. Potential community andd social benefits from the creation of each new car and vanpool are shown to total $800 and $4000 a year, respectively. Including personal benefits and subtracting time costs brings the total benefits per pool to approximately $2500 and $7700 respectively, with individual cost savings of $1000 to $1300 per year per person. (TRRL)