Assessment of how Ride-Hailing services affect individual's travel mode choice in urban transportation

Abstract

BACKGROUN AND OBJECTIVES: Ride-hailing is a term to describe booking rides and paying for car services through a smartphone app with a Transportation Network Company. As an innovation in the ride-hailing investigation in Iran, this paper is sought to analyze the influence of individual's demographic characteristics on their travel mode choice between ride-hailing, traditional taxi and private car. For this purpose, questionnaires in six different statuses have been designed, and 414 questionnaires have been completed in 22 districts of Tehran metropolitan region. METHODS: To check the utility of choosing private car and traditional taxi compared to ride-hailing, on short, medium, and, long travel distances with commuting and non-commuting purposes in the peak hours of morning and evening, the six multinomial logit models have been done by considering the ride-hailing option as reference alternative, and the private car and traditional taxi options as the first and second ` FINDING:Initially, six logit models were generated, which fitted models are all appropriate. All of the variables used in these models in choosing private car or traditional taxis compared to ride-hailing in different models were statistically significance. But, gender, household dimension, and individuals' educational level didn’t affect the individual's choice. CONCLUSION: The results showed that ride-hailing is more acceptable to younger people, and high-income people attract more to it. Therefore, ride-hailing services can be considered as a wealthy phenomenon and for the young generation. In addition, given the 67% response of individuals incline to use ride-hailing services in a shared way, because of the interest of individuals to use this mode of travel due to its lower cost in some situations, which can be considered as a separate mode of transportation.