Towards a Smart City—The Study of Car-Sharing Services in Poland

Abstract

In recent years, Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) has attracted much attention in the context of smart city development. One of the models of intelligent mobility is car-sharing, a modern and convenient form of renting vehicles through a mobile application. Car-sharing is a solution that can help to mitigate the effects of excessive traffic congestion, noise, and air pollution in cities. In Poland, car-sharing has developed in recent years. To increase its popularity, it is necessary to look at the barriers from the user’s perspective. The presented study is a diagnosis of car-sharing problems based on customer reviews. The reviews were obtained from the Google Play store and cover the applications of Poland’s three largest car-sharing service providers. Descriptive statistics and sentiment analysis were used to identify the problems. The study of users’ comments made it possible to establish that car-sharing has gained tremendous popularity in recent years, reflected in the number of reviews. Moreover, car-sharing services are assessed positively by the majority of users. Women perceive services more positively than men, although they are a minority among car-sharing users. The main problems described in the comments relate to the operation of the application, in particular, the registration of new users and the unclear payment policy.