What are the determinants of the willingness to share rides in pooled on-demand services?

What are the determinants of the willingness to share rides in pooled on-demand services?

Alonso González, M.J. (TU Delft Transport and Planning)
Cats, O. (TU Delft Transport and Planning)
van Oort, N. (TU Delft Transport and Planning)
Hoogendoorn-Lanser, S. (KiM Netherlands Institute for Transport Policy Analysis)
Hoogendoorn, S.P. (TU Delft Transport and Planning)

Transport and Planning

2020

Simulation studies suggest that pooled on-demand services (also referred to as Demand Responsive Transport, ridesharing, shared ride-hailing or shared ridesourcing services) have the potential to bring large benefits to urban areas while inducing limited time losses for their users. However, in reality, the large majority of users request individual rides (and not pooled rides) in existing on-demand services, leading to increases in motorised vehicle miles travelled. In this study, we investigate to what extent fare discounts, additional travel time, and the (un)willingness to share the ride with (different numbers of) other passengers play a role in the decision of individuals to share rides. To this end, we design a stated preference study targeting Dutch urban individuals. In our research, we (1) disentangle the sharing aspect from related time–cost trade-offs (e.g. detours), (2) investigate preference heterogeneity regarding the studied attributes and identify distinct market segments, and (3) simulate scenarios to understand the impact of the obtained parameters in the breakdown between individual and pooled services. We find that less than one third of respondents have strong preferences against sharing their rides. Also, we find that different market segments vary not only in their values of the willingness to share, but also in how they perceive this willingness to share (per-ride or proportional to the in-vehicle time). Further, the scenario analysis demonstrates that the share of individuals who are willing to share rides depends primarily on the time–cost trade-offs, rather than on the disutility stemming from pooling rides per se.

Choice modelling
DRT
Ridesharing
Scenario analysis
Stated preference
Willingness to share

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:26c1baaf-726e-48c1-9654-8bb802931793

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-020-10110-2

0049-4488

Transportation, 48 (2021) (4), 1733-1765

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2020 M.J. Alonso González, O. Cats, N. van Oort, S. Hoogendoorn-Lanser, S.P. Hoogendoorn