Impact of discerning reliability preferences of riders on the demand for mobility-on-demand services

ABSTRACT

We formalize one aspect of reliability in the context of Mobility-on-Demand (MoD) systems by acknowledging the uncertainty in the pick-up time of these services. This study answers two key questions: i) how the difference between the stated and actual pick-up times affect the propensity of a passenger to choose an MoD service? ii) how an MoD service provider can leverage this information to increase its ridership? We conduct a discrete choice experiment in New York to answer the former question and adopt a micro-simulation-based optimization method to answer the latter question. In our experiments, the ridership of an MoD service could be increased by up to 10% via displaying the predicted wait time strategically.

KEYWORDS:

• Discrete choice experiment
• reliability
• mobility-on-demand
• optimization

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. The mean of the distribution is set according to the simulation using NYC taxi historical data in alonso2017demand.

2. We resort to the enumeration-based optimization because the derivative of the choice probability is analytically intractable due to a complex integral in the average pick-up delay expression.

3. We are making an implicit assumption that the probability mass $f_i$ does not change with the displayed wait time.