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

Abstract

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.

Examining Customers’ Critical Acceptance Factors toward Ridepooling Services

“…They found that the willingness to share rides is at first a time-cost tradeoff. Alonso-Gonza´lez et al (12) examined the value of time and reliability for urban pooled ondemand service. With an experimental approach, they found that the value of time for pooled on-demand services ranged from 7.88 to 10.80 euros per hour.…”

“…In the case of a high utilization of ridepooling vehicles, the reduction of the number of vehicles on the road as well as the distances covered are particularly higher, compared with other new mobility services. Theoretically, ridepooling offers economic, environmental, and societal benefits (10)(11)(12)(13).…”

A business model perspective to understand intra-firm transitions: From traditional to flexible public transport services

“…These two aspects are the first to be evolved to accommodate changing needs and would feed back to the applicability and reliability of new transit options. The reflexive part is ongoing and has been reported in our earlier studies from both the perspective of the users (demand side) and the governance of FPTs ( Ali, 2017 ; Alonso-González, Liu, Cats, van Oort, & Hoogendoorn, 2018 ; Sharmeen & Meurs, 2019 ). The tactical aspects, although come across somewhat indirectly, needs more thought and knowledge of the FPT systems to be developed and communicated, as came across from the interviews conducted so far.…”

Travel Behavior of SME Employees in Their Work Commute in Emerging Cities: A Case Study in Dhaka City, Bangladesh

“…The authors disentangled the sharing aspect of time-cost trade off, i.e., to what extent individuals are willing to detour in order to get a discounted fare. They found the willingness to share rides primarily depended on the time-cost trade-offs [29]. In another study conducted in Ghana, it was found that young people of that region were more inclined to use a rideshare service due its convenience and cost advantages over conventional taxis [30].…”