A general coupled morning–evening traffic equilibrium model with rideshare, ride-hailing, and public transit services

Abstract

We develop a general equilibrium model to capture the complex interactions between different modes, such as solo driving, public transit, as well as rideshare and ride-hailing services such as Uber and Lyft, under a joint morning and evening commute framework. Formulated as a variational inequality (VI) and equivalently as a mixed complementarity problem (MiCP), the model allows (a) travelers to switch between different transportation modes and (b) passengers from different Origin-Destination (OD) pairs to share a ride together. The computational results on the Sioux-Falls network show that our model captures the possible mode switches and the coupling effects between morning and evening commutes. Furthermore, our numerical examples demonstrate that modelling morning and evening commutes separately tends to overestimate the travelers' disutility and the average Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) in the network.

Keywords:

• Coupled morning–evening traffic equilibrium
• variational inequality
• flexible rideshare
• ride-hailing
• public transit

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge METRANS for their financial support of this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In this paper, rideshare refers to the mode of carpooling with payments enabled by companies that distinguishes from traditional carpooling where no payment for the ride is made. It also differs from ride-hailing in terms of price and inconvenience cost.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Office of Aviation Analysis.