IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/transa/v173y2023ics0965856423001106.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Scale effects in ridesplitting: A case study of the City of Chicago

Author

Listed:
  • Liu, Hao
  • Devunuri, Saipraneeth
  • Lehe, Lewis
  • Gayah, Vikash V.

Abstract

Ridesplitting – a type of ride-hailing in which riders share vehicles with other riders – has become a common travel mode in some major cities. This type of shared ride option is currently provided by transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber, Lyft, and Via and has attracted increasing numbers of users, particularly before the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous findings have suggested ridesplitting can lower travel costs and even lessen congestion by reducing the number of vehicles needed to move people. Recent studies have also posited that ridesplitting should experience positive feedback mechanisms in which the quality of the service would improve with the number of users. Specifically, these systems should benefit from economies of scale and increasing returns to scale. This paper demonstrates evidence of their existence using trip data reported by TNCs to the City of Chicago between January and September 2019. Specifically, it shows that increases in the number of riders requesting or authorizing shared trips during a given time period is associated with shorter trip detours, higher rates of riders being matched together, lower costs relative to non-shared trips, and higher willingness for riders to share trips.

Suggested Citation

  • Liu, Hao & Devunuri, Saipraneeth & Lehe, Lewis & Gayah, Vikash V., 2023. "Scale effects in ridesplitting: A case study of the City of Chicago," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 173(C).
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:transa:v:173:y:2023:i:c:s0965856423001106
    DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2023.103690
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0965856423001106
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.tra.2023.103690?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Mortensen, Dale & Pissarides, Christopher, 2011. "Job Creation and Job Destruction in the Theory of Unemployment," Ekonomicheskaya Politika / Economic Policy, Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, vol. 1, pages 1-19.
    2. Dean, Matthew D. & Kockelman, Kara M., 2021. "Spatial variation in shared ride-hail trip demand and factors contributing to sharing: Lessons from Chicago," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 91(C).
    3. Clewlow, Regina R. & Mishra, Gouri S., 2017. "Disruptive Transportation: The Adoption, Utilization, and Impacts of Ride-Hailing in the United States," Institute of Transportation Studies, Working Paper Series qt82w2z91j, Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Davis.
    4. Mohring, Herbert, 1972. "Optimization and Scale Economies in Urban Bus Transportation," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 62(4), pages 591-604, September.
    5. Rayle, Lisa & Dai, Danielle & Chan, Nelson & Cervero, Robert & Shaheen, Susan, 2016. "Just a better taxi? A survey-based comparison of taxis, transit, and ridesourcing services in San Francisco," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 45(C), pages 168-178.
    6. Rayle, Lisa & Dai, Danielle & Chan, Nelson & Cervero, Robert & Shaheen, Susan PhD, 2016. "Just A Better Taxi? A Survey-Based Comparison of Taxis, Transit, and Ridesourcing Services in San Francisco," Institute of Transportation Studies, Research Reports, Working Papers, Proceedings qt60v8r346, Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Berkeley.
    7. Erhardt, Gregory D. & Hoque, Jawad Mahmud & Goyal, Vedant & Berrebi, Simon & Brakewood, Candace & Watkins, Kari E., 2022. "Why has public transit ridership declined in the United States?," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 161(C), pages 68-87.
    8. Zhu, Zheng & Qin, Xiaoran & Ke, Jintao & Zheng, Zhengfei & Yang, Hai, 2020. "Analysis of multi-modal commute behavior with feeding and competing ridesplitting services," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 132(C), pages 713-727.
    9. Diamond, Peter A, 1982. "Aggregate Demand Management in Search Equilibrium," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 90(5), pages 881-894, October.
    10. Morteza Taiebat & Elham Amini & Ming Xu, 2022. "Sharing Behavior in Ride-hailing Trips: A Machine Learning Inference Approach," Papers 2201.12696, arXiv.org.
    11. Shaheen, Susan PhD, 2018. "Shared Mobility: The Potential of Ride Hailing and Pooling," Institute of Transportation Studies, Research Reports, Working Papers, Proceedings qt46p6n2sk, Institute of Transportation Studies, UC Berkeley.
    12. Schaller, Bruce, 2021. "Can sharing a ride make for less traffic? Evidence from Uber and Lyft and implications for cities," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 1-10.
    13. Lehe, Lewis J. & Pandey, Ayush, 2020. "Hyperdemand: A static traffic model with backward-bending demand curves," Economics of Transportation, Elsevier, vol. 24(C).
    14. Leonardo J. Basso & Sergio R. Jara-Díaz, 2010. "The Case for Subsidisation of Urban Public Transport and the Mohring Effect," Journal of Transport Economics and Policy, University of Bath, vol. 44(3), pages 365-372, September.
    15. Susan Shaheen & Adam Cohen, 2019. "Shared ride services in North America: definitions, impacts, and the future of pooling," Transport Reviews, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 39(4), pages 427-442, July.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Pandey, Ayush & Lehe, Lewis J., 2024. "Congestive mode-switching and economies of scale on a bus route," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 183(C).
    2. Shulika, Olha & Bujak, Michal & Ghasemi, Farnoud & Kucharski, Rafal, 2024. "Spatiotemporal variability of ride-pooling potential – Half a year New York City experiment," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 114(C).

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Loa, Patrick & Hossain, Sanjana & Liu, Yicong & Nurul Habib, Khandker, 2022. "How has the COVID-19 pandemic affected the use of ride-sourcing services? An empirical evidence-based investigation for the Greater Toronto Area," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 155(C), pages 46-62.
    2. Yang, Hongtai & Luo, Peng & Li, Chaojing & Zhai, Guocong & Yeh, Anthony G.O., 2023. "Nonlinear effects of fare discounts and built environment on ridesplitting adoption rates," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 169(C).
    3. Dean, Matthew D. & Kockelman, Kara M., 2021. "Spatial variation in shared ride-hail trip demand and factors contributing to sharing: Lessons from Chicago," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 91(C).
    4. Zhang, Kenan & Nie, Yu (Marco), 2022. "Mitigating traffic congestion induced by transportation network companies: A policy analysis," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 159(C), pages 96-118.
    5. Zgheib, Najib & Abou-Zeid, Maya & Kaysi, Isam, 2020. "Modeling demand for ridesourcing as feeder for high capacity mass transit systems with an application to the planned Beirut BRT," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 138(C), pages 70-91.
    6. Fayed, Lynn & Nilsson, Gustav & Geroliminis, Nikolas, 2023. "On the utilization of dedicated bus lanes for pooled ride-hailing services," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 169(C), pages 29-52.
    7. Fulman, Nir & Marinov, Maria & Benenson, Itzhak, 2023. "Investigating occasional travel patterns based on smartcard transactions," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 141(C), pages 152-166.
    8. Schaller, Bruce, 2021. "Can sharing a ride make for less traffic? Evidence from Uber and Lyft and implications for cities," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 1-10.
    9. Xu, Yiming & Yan, Xiang & Liu, Xinyu & Zhao, Xilei, 2021. "Identifying key factors associated with ridesplitting adoption rate and modeling their nonlinear relationships," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 144(C), pages 170-188.
    10. Gehrke, Steven R., 2020. "Uber service area expansion in three major American cities," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 86(C).
    11. Wang, Hai & Yang, Hai, 2019. "Ridesourcing systems: A framework and review," Transportation Research Part B: Methodological, Elsevier, vol. 129(C), pages 122-155.
    12. Soria, Jason & Stathopoulos, Amanda, 2021. "Investigating socio-spatial differences between solo ridehailing and pooled rides in diverse communities," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 95(C).
    13. Vignon, Daniel & Yin, Yafeng & Ke, Jintao, 2023. "Regulating the ride-hailing market in the age of uberization," Transportation Research Part E: Logistics and Transportation Review, Elsevier, vol. 169(C).
    14. Ong, Felita & Loa, Patrick & Nurul Habib, Khandker, 2024. "Ride-sourcing demand in Metro Vancouver: Looking through the lens of disability," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 181(C).
    15. Zhang, Yufeng & Khani, Alireza, 2021. "Integrating transit systems with ride-sourcing services: A study on the system users’ stochastic equilibrium problem," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 150(C), pages 95-123.
    16. Yu, Haitao & Peng, Zhong-Ren, 2019. "Exploring the spatial variation of ridesourcing demand and its relationship to built environment and socioeconomic factors with the geographically weighted Poisson regression," Journal of Transport Geography, Elsevier, vol. 75(C), pages 147-163.
    17. Nguyen-Phuoc, Duy Quy & Vo, Nguyen S. & Su, Diep Ngoc & Nguyen, Vinh Hoang & Oviedo-Trespalacios, Oscar, 2021. "What makes passengers continue using and talking positively about ride-hailing services? The role of the booking app and post-booking service quality," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 150(C), pages 367-384.
    18. Tirachini, Alejandro & del Río, Mariana, 2019. "Ride-hailing in Santiago de Chile: Users’ characterisation and effects on travel behaviour," Transport Policy, Elsevier, vol. 82(C), pages 46-57.
    19. Vanderschuren, Marianne & Baufeldt, Jennifer, 2018. "Ride-sharing: A potential means to increase the quality and availability of motorised trips while discouraging private motor ownership in developing cities?," Research in Transportation Economics, Elsevier, vol. 69(C), pages 607-614.
    20. Brown, Anne E., 2020. "Who and where rideshares? Rideshare travel and use in Los Angeles," Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, Elsevier, vol. 136(C), pages 120-134.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:transa:v:173:y:2023:i:c:s0965856423001106. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/547/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.