With the growing ubiquity of ride-hailing services, passengers have come to expect door-to-door service. The good news? That eliminates a key challenge of mass transit systems: how to move passengers through the first or last mile of a trip. But ride-hailing has also led to a rise in congestion as more cars are on the road to service these passengers. Meanwhile, other services like dockless bikeshare and scooters are diversifying options to create a multimodal option—ride, bike, share. Robert Hampshire and colleagues tested if a multimodal system is feasible and would alleviate congestion.
Using New York City taxi cab and bikeshare data from 2015, the researchers designated major hubs around Manhattan during peak hours that customers would get to using bikeshare. Their model showed that more than 80 percent of trips could conveniently be assigned to a carpool—dropping taxi use by 40 percent. The results suggest that multimodal connections between ride-hailing and dockless bikeshare and possibly scooters reduce trip times and lessen congestion.
Read “Multimodal Connections between Bikesharing and Ride-Hailing: An Empirical Study in New York City” in the proceedings of the 2018 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems.
Below is a formatted version of this article from State & Hill, the magazine of the Ford School. View the entire Winter 2019 State & Hill.
