The Potential of Ridesharing Adoption and its Effects on CO2 Emissions and Customer Experience

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that a one-to-one taxi ride sharing strategy can significantly reduce travel time and CO2 emissions, while maintaining low passenger inconvenience and offering potential fare savings, thus promoting shared urban mobility.

Contribution

The paper introduces a simple, effective one-to-one taxi sharing method that reduces emissions and travel time, with practical implementation advantages over complex dynamic routing approaches.

Findings

48% reduction in total journey time

20.129 tons decrease in daily CO2 emissions

13% overall matching rate, 27% in high-demand areas

Abstract

Taxi services are an integral part of urban transport and are a major contributor to air pollution and traffic congestion, which adversely affect human life and health. Sharing taxi rides is one way to reduce the unfavorable effects of cab services on cities. However, this comes at the expense of passenger discomfort, quantified in terms of longer travel times. Taxi ridesharing is a sophisticated mode of urban transport that combines individual trip requests with similar spatiotemporal characteristics into a shared ride. We propose a one-to-one sharing strategy that pairs trips with similar starting and ending points. We examine the method using an open dataset with trip information on over 165 million taxi rides. We show that the cumulative journey time can be reduced by 48 percent while maintaining a relatively low level of passenger inconvenience, with a total average delay compared to an individual mobility case of 6 minutes and 42 seconds. This advantage is accompanied by decreases in emissions of 20.129 tons on an ordinary day and a potential fare reduction of 49 percent, which could point to a widespread passenger acceptance of shared taxi services. Overall, a matching rate of 13 percent is reached while a 27 percent matching rate is attained for high-demand areas. Compared to many-to-many sharing dynamic routing methodologies, our scheme is easier to implement and operate, making fewer assumptions about data availability and customer acceptance.