On the influence of cost and time on the willingness to share a ride: A scenario analysis (PPT)

Simulation studies suggest that pooled on-demand services (also referred to as ridesplitting or shared ride-hailing/ridesourcing services) have the potential to bring large benefits to urban areas with little time loss for their users. However, the large majority of on-demand requests in existing services are for individual rides. In this study, we investigate to what extent fare discounts, time losses, 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 designed a stated preference study, and simulated different scenarios based on an estimated discrete choice Mixed Logit model. We found that the share of individuals who are willing to share their rides depends primarily on the time-cost trade-off they encounter, rather than on the disutility stemming from pooling rides per se. We also found that the disutility of having one or two extra passengers is constant regardless of the trip length, whereas it further increases with trip distance in the event that one shares the ride with four additional passengers. The depicted scenarios show the impacts that larger/smaller time-cost trade-offs and different number of individuals in a ride would have on the shares of individual versus pooled on-demand services. These insights are relevant to on-demand service providers who wish to offer pooled services and to transportation authorities who may be interested in internalising the externalities stemming from the increase in vehicle miles travelled related with individual rides.Transport and PlanningDelft ProjectmanagementTransport and Plannin