Assessing On-Demand Mobility Services and Policy Impacts: A Case Study from Chengdu, China

TL;DR

This study develops a simulation framework to compare ride-hailing and street-hailing services in Chengdu, evaluating policy impacts on efficiency, and finds ride-hailing can significantly reduce waiting times and deadheading, especially with targeted demand management.

Contribution

It introduces a novel simulation framework combining graph theory and real data to assess ride-hailing policies and their effects on urban mobility performance.

Findings

Ride-hailing reduces passenger waiting time by up to 81%.

Geofencing can worsen overall performance but benefits city center trips.

Demand management effectively reduces waiting time without increasing deadheading.

Abstract

The rapid expansion of ride-hailing services has significantly reshaped urban on-demand mobility patterns, but it still remains unclear how they perform relative to traditional street-hailing services and how effective are related policy interventions. This study presents a simulation framework integrating a graph theory-based trip-vehicle matching mechanism with real cruising taxi operations data to simulate ride-hailing services in Chengdu, China. The performances of the two on-demand mobility service modes (i.e., ride-hailing and street-hailing) are evaluated in terms of three key performance indicators: average passenger waiting time (APWT), average deadheading miles (ADM), and average deadheading energy consumption (ADEC). We further examine the impacts of spatiotemporal characteristics and three types of policies: fleet size management, geofencing, and demand management, on the performance of ride-hailing services. Results show that under the same fleet size and trip demand as street-hailing taxis, ride-hailing services without cruising achieve substantial improvements, reducing APWT, ADM, and ADEC by 81\%, 75\%, and 72.1\%, respectively. These improvements are most pronounced during midnight low-demand hours and in remote areas such as airports. Our analysis also reveals that for ride-hailing service, (1) expanding fleet size yields diminishing marginal benefits; (2) geofencing worsens overall performance while it improves the performance of serving all trips within the city center; and (3) demand-side management targeting trips to high-attraction and low-demand areas can effectively reduce passenger waiting time without increasing deadheading costs.