A General Model of Ridesharing Services

TL;DR

This paper introduces a versatile analytical model for various door-to-door transit services, including taxis, DRT, and ridesharing, providing simplified formulas for system analysis.

Contribution

It offers a unified, deterministic framework that encompasses multiple transit modes, enabling approximate analysis through closed-form formulas.

Findings

Model includes non-shared taxis, DRT, and ridesharing as special cases.

Provides approximate closed-form formulas for transit system analysis.

Framework is simple but yields optimistic results due to its deterministic nature.

Abstract

The paper presents a general analytic framework to model transit systems that provide door-to-door service. The model includes as special cases non-shared taxi and demand responsive transportation (DRT). In the latter we include both, paratransit services such as dial-a-ride (DAR), and the form of ridesharing (shared taxi) currently being used by crowd-sourced taxi companies like Lyft and Uber. The framework yields somewhat optimistic results because, among other things, it is deterministic and does not track vehicles across space. By virtue of its simplicity however, the framework yields approximate closed form formulas for many cases of interest.